Series Two: Alien (In Five Episodes)
by J. David Reed
Summary: A 5 Episode story arc that follows the Doctor, Clara, and some OCs as they are dragged slowly but surely into one of the Doctor's darkest secrets, dragging up some old friends and new enemies in the process. Follows on from my Series One - Human.
1. E1C1: The Tourist

'Now, what's this supposed to be?' the Doctor whispered to the TARDIS, his TARDIS, as he filtered through old software, giving it some updates and touches that could come in handy.

He held in his hand a small circular ball that glowed with an odd, green light, and he watched it with a certain intrigue and grace with which you would inspect a person for injury after a fall.

'Are you... an energy couplet? A battery? A paperweight?' He turned it over in his hand. 'A bomb? An email?'

He squashed it and he felt the two sides condense, as though they were sliding over a smaller, inside ball. It clicked and he frowned, not understanding. This was a part of the TARDIS's structure he hadn't encountered before.

'What are you?!' he cried, smiling as he sonic-ed it.

It clicked again and a sliding part moved over the inside, and for a second he saw a small cube inside, but it was gone again before he could do anything about it.

'Bloody TimeLord science... can't do anything simple.'

He tried to move it, slide the pieces into a position that would allow him to inspect the cube inside, but to no avail. It was being awkward.

Still with it in-hand, the Doctor made his way back to the console room, giving this curious little orb more attention than he perhaps should have, resulting in him taking two wrong turns and having to circle back.

When back at the console room, the Doctor placed the little orb inside an up-turned fez-like hat he had encountered at a market in the Ylurt system. It did resemble a fez, although it was perhaps a little longer than Earth-made ones, and it didn't have a tassel at the top - instead it had a little rubber bobble that bounced as you walked.

Also, they didn't call it a fez. It was called a Pizza, actually, making the translation a little awry when it came to attempting to order an actual pizza in an Ylurtian food market. Odd place.

The TARDIS, for the moment, was between destinations and just sort-of ambling through the time vortex, giving the Doctor some thinking time whilst he was on his holiday. It was the first time in a while he'd had some time to himself, trying to keep up with everything that was happening. Clara was all through time, saving his back at every turn. Trenzalore was the war-torn scene he'd feared it would be, meaning it was pretty much where he was going to fall.

'The fall of the Eleventh,' Dorian had said, all that time ago. MAybe he was getting closer.

It was strange, it seemed, how many times this body, his eleventh regeneration, had either died or been so close to death that it was a genuine concern. He was almost dead in the Pandorica, he faked his death at Lake Silencio, The Silence wanted him dead to prevent something happening at Trenzalore, even though whatever happened seemed to end with his death anyway.

The Universe was obsessed with him dying.

Well, that's today's self-esteem down the drain. Maybe tomorrow he'd get the hang of it.

He began setting the coordinates for a moon he'd been told about whilst at the market - a tiny thing no bigger than Earth's moon, and with similar gravity to Earth itself, seeing as it was so dense. A thick, heavy red-brown stone made almost all of the moon, through to the core.

According to the nice ice vendor, it was covered in cave systems that, once you enter, you can never leave. It has some sort of hypnotic property, he had told him. Anyone who looks into the cave entrance feels the urge to go inside and explore, but once they lose the light they are lost forever.

The story had interested the Doctor, even though he was looking for some quiet time alone, and he intended to go there and investigate the hypnotic caves of a moon called Gug.

But, then he got distracted by an alert telling him there was a little malfunction somewhere in the software, and he'd started updating and re-inventing the whole thing, and then he found that little orb. A little orb with a little cube inside that made equally little sense.

He picked up the orb as the TARDIS began moving off towards Gug, throwing it into the air, testing it's weight.

He'd never seen anything like it. The sides could slide, but only in certain directions, and those directions seemed to be changed at random. It had Gallifreyan symbols on some of the sides, but seeing as they overlapped it was difficult to try and read, but he did manage to catch two words: home and contain. Helpful.

Pocketing the little orb as it glowed and ebbed, he landed the TARDIS onto the rocky terrain of Gug's only populated area - Gugland. It was mainly a tourist attraction, though the outlawing of anyone actually going within seeing distance of any cave meant that interest had slowly died down over the years. It was now desolate and quiet, the soft wind was warm in the light of their Sun, Gus, and he knew that it was unlikely he would run into anyone else.

As he explored the ex-tourist town of Gugland, he came to the sudden realisation that he had become what he despised most. The one thing he had always been, but always in a superior kind of way. V.I.P. But now, now he was just on holiday. He was one of them. A tourist. A space tourist, visiting the universe biggest attractions, occasionally getting into some rough patches.

Yes, his life was perhaps more perilous than the usual holiday-goer, but that was only now and then. Often, in between, it would be markets and rides and food and celebrities.

Oh god.

But, then again, perhaps being a tourist wasn't the worst thing in the world. Or universe... After all, he did get to see things no one else in history would experience. He had been to so many places, so many times. All through history, his face is stamped. All eleven of them.

Perhaps that's why the universe keeps trying to get rid of him: it's grown sick of him.

Despite how his touring habits might disgust him, the Doctor continued to wander around Gugland, stumbling across a building that seemed to be some sort of information... place.

Moving inside, the Doctor found a leaflet that showed a single picture of the most famous cave - the one people so often gave themselves to. It showed the rusted mound of earth that shaped the cave, which, according to the leaflet, was about eight feet tall. It showed the fence in front of it, warding away people who are looking to be engulfed by this mysterious entity.

The mouth of the cave itself was indeed hypnotic. Even here, through the picture, the Doctor felt a strong need to climb inside and walk until his feet bled.

It was an odd feeling, to be invited by a photograph, but he knew what was going on. He knew that it was a property of the cave, somehow. He was completely able to resist it's pull, even feeling slightly repelled by the thought of it taking so many lives.

He searched the leaflet, but it didn't give a number of how many people had been lost inside before they had set up these posts.

Apparently, there used to be live guards watching the mouth of the cave to make sure people didn't walk in, but the guards kept walking in too, so that was an abandoned idea.

He heard a beep from his pocket.

Pulling out the orb, it's shifting surface pulled back, almost on it's own, and revealed to the Doctor the small cube inside. It was tiny - luminescent white and hovering in the centre of the odd orb.

It began to vibrate violently, shaking in his hands until he covered the cube up, pushing the sides of the orb back into their stubborn places.

'So you were a bomb!'' the Doctor said, smiling a concerned smile. 'Called it.'

But why?

What was it here for? It was a mysterious piece of TimeLord tech that seemed to be an explosive, planted in his TARDIS. What the hell could be the purpose of that?

And why had it activated here and now? On Gug? Was it because he'd found it, because he took it out of the TARDIS?

Maybe that was it.

Tightly grasping the small thing, he dashed back to the TARDIS, putting the orb back inside the fez/pizza, and took that to a bomb-shelter room he'd installed a while ago. He assumed it would have the same effect if the explosion was inside as out?

He had to hope so.


	2. E1C2: Reckless and Stupid

Having the orb inside his bomb-shelter made the Doctor feel only slightly more confident, as he had no idea whether it was going to explode or not. It might be a prison for some incredibly dangerous energy, or some creature that would engulf the universe as we know it. It could just be a vibration ball, though the thought of what people would use one of those as made him shudder.

He found some rope on a reel, from a room he didn't often use in the TARDIS, and that old exploration suit he still had - the red one with the yellow helmet. Putting it on, he went back to that impossible little rock he and Rose had found themselves on all that time ago. It felt like millenia ago to him. In fact, it was only centuries.

The TimeLord made his way back out of the TARDIS and out to the edge of the 'safety zone' of Gug, where there was a great fence that held him back from visual contact with the cave.

'So that's where we're going, eh?' eh smiled, grasping the rope and tying himself by the waist. He pull put down the reel and activated the clamp at the bottom, fixing it to the earth underneath. It wasn't going anywhere. 'Good. Excellent.'

Next for the fence. It was an easy break - the sonic screwdriver was able to fix wiring just as easily as it could temporarily break it. He cut himself a Doctor-shaped hole in the fence and stepped through, rope turning in the reel. He tested the 'stop' button on the belt loop he had attached to the suit, feeling the rope fix. He leaned forwards, testing it's strength, and was pleased to feel it hold him up effortlessly.

Taking the reel off 'stop', he made his way steadily out into the orange waste.

The desert was long and, well, deserted. There was no sign of life, just dirt. Dirt and heat. The sun, Gus, was beating down on the solitary and temporary inhabitant of Gug with zeal, making him feel like the mouth of the cave he approached was not only inviting, but a need fr survival.

The shade was tempting and the heat made his mind susceptible to the faint hypnotic vibes he felt emanating from Gug's famous caves. It was pulling him in, and he was going to let it.

But, unlike his predecessors, the Doctor was prepared.

The mouth was only a few metres away now, and the suit had started to feel even more uncomfortable than usual, heavy on his body under the heat of Gus. The Doctor stopped, staring into it and inspecting the rock surrounding it. Something felt off about this place. Fake. Familiar. He couldn't put his finger on it.

It felt like he was staring into hell. Or an actual mouth. It felt final. But, with that nagging feeling in his head wanted to find out why it was here. Why this simple little hole on the face of a moon had claimed not only the curiosity, but also the lives, of so many. What was it about this place that was so special?

Moving closer still, the Doctor was acutely aware of the pull. Something wanted to pull him inside.

'I'm supposed to be stopping this sort of thing,' he whined as he took a step out of the heat and into the shade of the cave.

The coolness of it was exquisite, but aside from that everything else seemed fine. He felt no change in his body, nor mind. He was sane, in control of his actions.

But he wasn't supposed to get lost yet. It was once you had lost the light behind you, right? Once that lonely soul had left the light of the desert, then they would never return.

The Doctor contemplated, for a moment, going back. Checking everything was alright. There was no real rush, after all. No person in danger that hadn't already got hurt. There was no incentive here. It was just... travelling. Seeing a curiosity of reality that had never been explained. He could so easily go back, get some equipment that would let him measure different things, like feedback, energy levels, electro magnetic pull. It would be simple.

So why was he not?

Why was he still walking into the darkness that would surely devour him?

Because curiosity killed the cat, that's why. And if the Doctor was anything, it was curious.

He looked behind him, and there was still a very large ball of light representing the entrance, white and unforgiving desert light. The rope flexed when he tugged on it, meaning he was still attached to the reel, which he could activate to pull him back at any time he wanted. He was safe. Completely safe. Right?

He moved forwards, always looking back to check the light. It was a straight line, and the little light on his helmet let him see that the insides of the cave were as rocky as the outside. Eventually the light behind fell smaller and smaller, until he knew that as soon as he took another step he would be devoured by the darkness.

Again he contemplated going back. It would be easy, he told himself.

'Why do I never just do the smart thing to start with?' he asked himself. 'This is so very, very stupid, Doctor.'

He took the step, almost feeling the light fall off him.

It was so silent.

The torch kept him alight, but he realised that if he started to walk back towards where the mouth of the cave had been, it was just more cave. More rock. No light. No sun. That's why no one had ever got out. It shuts behind you.

He was alone now. Shut off from- hold on.

He tugged on the rope at his waist and felt it, limp. It came to his as he pulled it lightly, and eventually the torn end reached him. It wasn't frayed, however. It was clean, like it had been sliced at the mouth of the cave.

He let the rope fall to the rocky floor, losing it from his waist, and continued down the cave path before him.

Darkness seemed to seep in, crowding around him, like it was watching. hunting him. He took his sonic screwdriver out of a small pocket of the suit and took a scan of the cave wall, finding that it was just about as rocky as it looked- wait...

It flickered. Not the wall, the reading.

'What was that?' he asked the small device, cautiously scanning for air levels. Breathable.

Removing his helmet, the Doctor took a closer look at the wall. There must be something about this place. Something wrong with it. Something causing everything, the missing people, the closing mouth, the deserted town.

He scanned it again, and, again, the findings flickered for a second, a blip in the signal.

'That! What was that?!' he moved the screwdriver, inspecting it. There was no fault. 'What are you?!'

'Hello?' he heard.

His attention was skewed immediately. Who cared about a wall? There was someone down here. Close.

'Hello?!' the Doctor yelled. 'Hello? I'm the Doctor! Here to help!'

There was a shuffle, off in the darkness. He directed his torch in the direction he thought he could hear it coming from, but it was far too dark to see much.

'I need... help me, please,' came the voice. It sounded male, young. Possibly human, but that'd just be the translator working it's magic.

The Doctor started running, bolting further into the cave. Was it possible for someone to survive? He hadn't thought to check when the last person was lost. he wasn't even sure there was a record.

This whole this was reckless and stupid, and he knew it, but something was going on, and maybe there was a survivor.


	3. E1C3: A Survivor

'Help me please,' the voice called to him. The Doctor sprinted after it, focusing on the sound of the voice, even if it didn't sound particularly scared. In fact, it sounded only a little worried. Irked.

The voice always sounded close, but not near, if that made sense. It was like there was a person round the next corner, but the corner never came. Just more of the wall.

Eventually the Doctor slowed to a trot, unable to keep up the pace. Still, he could hear shuffling, some muttering, almost at his ear but nowhere to be seen.

Of course, it was pitch-black aside from the green glow of his screwdriver, so he couldn't tell if something was there or not. for all he knew, there could be Angels surrounding him, waiting for him, watching and enjoying his obliviousness to them. Or, as always, there could be something new and equally terrifying as the Angels, somewhere down in the dark.

He kept moving forward, aiming for the sounds that seemed to be at his sides. It had moved away from cries of words now, he noticed. No more 'help me', just moans of, it seemed, loneliness. Whoever was down here must have been down here a while.

The Doctor suddenly started to think logically, how would someone survive down here? There's only so much time a person can last without food or water before they die, and there didn't seem to be any sustenance of any kind down here. That meant whoever was down here had been here a while, but not too long. With supplies, they maybe last a few weeks down here. Without, a few days. Maybe.

'Hello?' the Doctor asked the air. There was a response, from somewhere undefinable, of a louder moan than before.

The Doctor turned to his side, looking for a wall to get his bearings, but he had seemed to have reached a clearing, which wasn't good. For all he knew, he was at a dead-end, and he wouldn't know it. It could close of behind him, shutting him inside a rocky tomb. This could be it.

He read somewhere that if you live forever, the chances of you becoming trapped in an inescapable place rocket, because when you live forever you experience everything, especially with a time machine. Maybe his time was now.

He decided that the best way to go was forward, but he did so with a gulp and a closed eye, immediately checking that the doorway behind him hadn't closed off. It hadn't. He was good.

As the cave stretched on and on, he started to think that this was an incredibly bad idea. No one had ever got out of here, why did he think he was any different? That ego was going to be the death of him.

Soon, however, he started to see and odd blue light somewhere ahead. He could hear those sounds, too, as well as some odd throbbing-type noise. The Doctor found a wall to his left, and scanned it again, started where he had earlier, and still found the reading was flickering.

'Okay, what is that?' He knew it wasn't a mistake - something was interfereing with his screwdriver. There were only a few things that had the strength to do that, wood included.

He headed in the direction of the blue light, silently computing what the likeliness of this being a trap was. And, at that, how likely it was that the trap had something to do with the interference. High, he found. Very, really very high.

'Anyone there?' he called out, now a little more tense and cautious.

'Maybe,' someone replied. Great. Cryptic calls in the dark. Definitely a trap.

'Maybe?' he responded, smiling a little. Best to be optimistic. Ever the optimist. 'Why maybe?'

'Because I'm not sure anymore,' said the voice.

The Doctor headed towards the light, which, by the way, is never a good idea. Symbolically speaking, he was heading somewhere he wasn't going to like.

From all his experience, the Doctor had, at some point, concluded that there must be a God somewhere up there, amongst the cosmos, watching everything and flowing through every little creature it held. And it had a stupid, immature sense of humour that lead to him receiving the most convoluted, backwards plotlines he could think up. Everything had a point, a plot pusher, an expansion and a development.

And, if that meant that 'God' was just a writer with an offbeat sense of humour and a slightly inflated ego, this meant that 'heading towards the light' was spelling of certain doom, or of great untold riches and pleasantness.

Of course, when the Doctor saw what was generating the bright, blue light now close enough to see, he realised it could be both. Doom and riches. Darkness and light. Altogether, in the one place that gave his life as much balance as it deserved.

A TARDIS.

Before him stood the bright, curling column of moving light and silent power, kept within the six-segment console in a form he hadn't seen before - some type of rocky format. It was as though the column was a huge crystal, bursting from the earth and leading out through the ceiling. The sounds he heard earlier had become more pronounced - groaning sounds, creaking with age.

But it was a TARDIS. An actual TARDIS. Living, down here, in the middle of nowhere.

'This is impossible...' he breathed, walking towards the crystal pillar of light. It glimmered as he approached, as though recognising him, bouncing his image around the sides of the blue construct, dancing with him in light.

'You see it?' came the voice he had heard.

The Doctor didn't turn to look at who it was. He didn't care. Nothing mattered. This was a TARDIS. That meant TimeLords... maybe someone crashed. This place, it was a tomb. Nothing can escape. They never came to find him because they couldn't. The TARDIS went into lockdown.

The entire cave system, it was corridors, corrupted by time... People had died here.

'I see it,' he eventually responded.

'I'm not mad?'

'You're not mad.' He snapped himself out of it, shaking his head and looking away. It was hypnotising. What the hell did this mean? Another TARDIS, just out here. Waiting. Hidden and broken.

He decided to look, instead, at whoever was talking to him. It was a small, hunched-over boy who looked about 18, with long, matted hair and a small smile on his face.

'I'm not mad,' he said, looking at the floor. 'But-' he suddenly started to look incredibly scared. 'That means- Oh, no, nononono...'

'What, what is it? What does it mean?' the doctor started asking this boy.

'That means they're coming,' he said, the fear around him palpable. He trusted the Doctor instantly, as though he had never seen another person. 'This,' he thrust a small box with a green sigil the Doctor didn't recognise into the Doctor's waist. 'Keep it away from them.'

'Who?'

'Take me out?' the boy asked. 'Can you take me out of here?'

'I...' the Doctor genuinely didn't know. He had no idea if he could get out. Although, now he knew this was a TARDIS, albeit a faulty one, he knew he could navigate it a little better. This wasn't his TARDIS, so it wasn't broadcasting information into him, but it was this person's... was this boy like him? A survivor?

'Just tell me,' the Doctor said, helping the boy up in agreement to get him out. 'Are you a TimeLord?'

'I don't know...' he said, shaking his head. 'I don't know what I am or who I am or who you are but you are important. You and that box are connected, I know it. I feel it.'

'Right,' the Doctor nodded, unsure of where to go from there. Apparently he's connected to a box. Excellent.


	4. E1C4: More To It

He took the box, lifting it high and inspecting every aspect of it. 'So... what's inside it?'

'Don't drop it,' said the boy. 'Never open it.'

'Never?' he asked, still looking. 'Looks Time Lord-y. If you came from the Time War, then I guess that makes this dangerous.'

'Dangerous... yes...' the boy shook his head, angry at himself. 'I can't remember...'

'It's okay, it's fine... what's your name?'

'I don't... ow, I don't know... it hurts...'

'Hey, hey hey,' the Doctor dropped to him, joining the boy on the floor. 'It's okay. We need to focus on getting out of here, yeah?'

'Yeah.'

'Okay. Dangerous box, things coming for us and a possible TimeLord in a faulty TARDIS... I can work with this.'

The boy remained silent, watching the Doctor thoughtfully as he bounced up, leaving the box on the floor. He circled the crystal pillar, bathing in the blue light and inspecting the console, making some sense of the controls. It didn't help that every time the TARDIS regenerated, it's control panel swapped around, almost seeming to avoid being understood for too long. Every time he thought he had a feel for it, either he would change or it would.

'Okay, okay I think I can work this,' he said scanning the console. 'Screwdriver says it's not the console that's faulty.'

'Screwdriver?'

'It's sonic!'

'Why?'

'Because... because I said so.'

'Why do you say so?' the boy asked, suddenly challenging him. 'Why is it your place to say so? What's your authority?!' he screamed, the sound echoing around the huge room, surrounding them. He fell silent, leaving the Doctor to his deductions, both about the TARDIS and about the boy.

Trauma, he thought. PTSD, probably from the Time War. Which means, well a lot of things. A Way out. A leak. Or a different war... this could have been here for hundreds of years, the TARDIS keeping him alive. The Doctor really didn't like that thought, but he couldn't be sure of anything. It was impossible, anyway. The Time War was Timelocked - the operative bit being 'locked'. No way in or out. Sealed away, in a shameful corner of reality.

It scared him to think, though. What if...

'Not the console,' the Doctor said, continuing his earlier train of thought. 'Then what?'

'Where am I?'

'It's a ship,' he said. 'One of the greatest ships ever. Not as good as mine, and a little bit broken, but it's still pretty damn impressive.'

'A ship... like a boat?'

'A space-boat, yes.'

'Space... planets and stars. Endless black-'

'And endless life,' the Doctor said, smiling to him. He helped the boy to his feet, holding the box and his screwdriver in his other hand. 'Endless, wonderful life. Do you want to see it?'

He nodded, but that small moment of light was snuffed out by a sound. A shuffle.

The boy jumped at the sound, recognising it and drawing back in terror. 'Here...' he said, quivering. 'Always here.'

'Hello?' the Doctor called out.

Nothing.

Nothing but the darkness, and the noise. Like shifting feet on the dirt, dragging the tiny stones built by the TARDIS matrix.

'You know,' he said to the boy. 'It wasn't too long ago I had a look down into my own TARDIS's matrix. The very core, where there's a black hole consuming a star.'

'What's your point?' the boy snapped, scared like hell.

'My point is that, even though a TARDIS can change it's desktop theme, it's hardware is still the same. We could have a root around, see what's wrong.'

'How would that help?'

'Well, you wanna stay here and wait for... whatever's out there?'

'They don't come into the light. I found light, I'm staying in it.'

'Lights! Yes!' the Doctor pointed his screwdriver upwards, and the whole cave burst into bright, blue light. Orbs of crystal clarity, illuminating the rocky interior, hung from the ceiling, bursting with colour, casting shadow in ever corner.

The sound of feet, rushing down the cave and into small, hidden, dark passages could be heard, but neither the Doctor nor the boy could see.

'You turned on the lights!' the boy smiled. 'I can see it... where are we?'

'It's a TARDIS, the greatest ship in the universe. Nearly.'

'So,' he said, 'what's the plan?'

'You want a plan, now?'

'No... yes. I don't want anything. I need out. Out of here. Get me out. What's your name?'

'The Doctor, I told you... I'm sure I did.'

'I don't remember.'

'No... no you don't. Tell me, where are we?'

'A cave?'

'And when did you get here?'

'I don't know. As long as I remember.'

'When did I get here?'

'As long as I can remember.'

'Memory loss. On-going memory loss.' The Doctor took the box from him and held it up. 'What is this?'

'Important,' the boy said, as though remembering a fact he had been told to remember. 'Very. Don't open it. Not yet.'

'Yes, I know, don't worry.'

There was a sound somewhere in the cave.

'Are they coming back?' the boy asked, terrified suddenly.

'Are what coming back?'

'I don't know. Them. My head is hurting, is that right?' he said, shaking his head. He hit his own temple, dazing himself slightly. The Doctor had to grab his wrist to prevent him doing it again, even when the boy fought and fought against him.

'You're okay, you're okay,' the Doctor said, thinking. Did he have memory-loss? He couldn't remember telling this boy his name, but this teenager couldn't remember him arriving at all. The TARDIS was slightly psychic, after all. Maybe those sounds in the dark weren't the only villain around.

Perhaps there was more to it.


	5. E1C5: Simuss

'Come on,' the Doctor said, urging the boy to move. Now, in the light, the area seemed fairly safe, if indeed the things in the dark stuck to the shadows. Sure enough, as he pulled up the boy, he stuck to the light, never straying anywhere near a shadow, whether it be cast by a small passageway or just a spot where the light couldn't quite reach.

The boy moved with him, still occasionally punishing himself for something, hitting and biting himself.

They began down a corridor deeper into this TARDIS, it's cave walls claustrophobic and all bizarrely similar, giving the boy no way of keeping up with where they were headed down the twists and turns of the caves, moving deeper and deeper down.

After a little while, the lights started to flicker. The boy noticed instantly, his paranoia of the dark kicking in. The Doctor, however, was too busy building a mental map - storing every turn, the distances, the doorways they passed but never entered. He was working out the layout. Guessing, a lot, but working it all out.

It was a structure similar to most TARDIS ships - confusing but regular. He wanted to get to somewhere there was a fault, so he scanned every inch of the walls as they passed them, zeroing in on the problem. The reason this place had swallowed so many souls.

After darting round corners, holding back the boy's arms and avoiding anything that wasn't fully lit, the lights started to demand attention.

One cut out directly above the young boy, scaring him half to death.

At first the Doctor tried to ignore it, and he began to walk away.

'I know you,' came a voice.

The boy started to cry.

It had come from the shadow. The entire corridor behind them had shut down, dipped in black paint. Ahead of them, however, was perfectly clear.

'The TARDIS is psychic,' the Doctor reasoned. 'It can play with your head. If it's faulty, then maybe it's making you see monsters where there aren't any.'

'But I know you,' said the shadow. 'Doctor.'

'Doctor?' the boy said. 'That's your name... isn't it? It knows you?!'

'Keep walking,' the Doctor said, trying to make it sound like it wasn't an order. 'We'll find the fault.'

'The fault?' said the shadow, mocking him. 'The only fault here is life, Doctor.'

'Life?' he asked, looking directly into the shadow. He could almost see a face, hidden behind the cloak of darkness. The voice wasn't male or female, threatening or kind. It was just there. Everywhere. 'What do you know of life.'

He could feel the shadow smiling at him.

'I know it ends.'

'You know, my TARDIS said the exact same thing,' he said, making conversation. If he could get it to talk, he might learn something about these shadows. Talking shadows. Deja Vu. 'Only, she said it was sad. Life ending was sad.'

'I am not a TARDIS,' said the shadow. 'I am the shadow within.'

'You are alive, then?'

'Life is a fault.'

'And you are life,' said the Doctor. 'You're alive. You're the fault. A cancer, maybe? Using this place as an easy way to capture prey.'

'You are correct.'

'No I'm not,' said the Doctor, smiling. 'You just wanted me to believe anything I said. Make up my own lie. Truth is, you don't know what you are, because it hasn't told you. You are the TARDIS. This cave-like, living TARDIS created you. I don't know why it did. I don't know if there is a reason. But I do know one thing, and that's that there is something down here. In this ship. Eating away. And I'm going to fix it, because that's who I am. I'm the Doctor. Handyman of the Universe.'

'We are not in your Universe.'

The Doctor's face dropped.

Even the boy stopped to watch. Every motion, every twitch at the corner of his mouth was a new, exciting thought. A new connection. Such a magnificent brain of his, but only now was he clicking on.

'That's why you turned out the lights,' he said, looking at the shadows. 'To shut us out. Away.'

'You were so close, Doctor.'

'What is it talking about?' the boy whimpered, taking that box from the Doctor. He clutched it close, like a security blanket.

'We're not in the universe anymore. The TARDIS, it exists in two separate dimensions. The door is the bridge between them. That's where the fault is. Back in the console room.'

'But there wasn't a door,' the boy said.

'No, but there was a cave. A cave that let you in, but not out. That was the doorway. It's cracked, broken. I could fix it, but now...'

The shadow smiled at him again. He felt it. 'Now the lights are out. You would have to pass through me, and while you might, Doctor, your young friend would never. Scared, boy?'

The boy ignored it, standing as tall as he could against the shadow, staring into the mirage of a face, the twists of darkness that echoed hands, arms, bodiliness. The haunting image of the pitch-black figure was approached by this paranoid, helpless teenager, and it was impressed.

'Yes,' said the boy. 'I am scared.' He swallowed. 'But I'm brave. I think. I don't know. You stole my memories from my head. You took them from me.'

'Oh no, boy,' it said, mocking again. 'You took them yourself.'

'WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?!' he exploded, arms thrown out, lashing through the shadows, scratching at them. 'What do you mean?!'

'Your memories are not mine to steal,' it said, as the lights began to turn back on, revealing the corridor, or cave, rather, that they had followed down here.

But then, the shadows did something the Doctor could not do. It did something the boy couldn't do. Something this cave seemed to have swallowed along with all those poor souls. It gave the boy a name.

'Simuss.'

It stopped him in his tracks. Simuss. He knew that name. It was his. He couldn't remember being given it, or when anybody had ever used it but the shadow.

But it was his.

Simuss.

'That's my name,' he said, just as the shadow evaporated, leaving the empty, light corridor open to them.

'Come on,' said the Doctor, pushing him on. They had a door to fix and a universe to return to.

'Doctor,' Simuss said, stopping him. The Doctor looked back and saw him, static in his spot, staring at his own hands. 'What am I?'

He had rather hoped that hearing his name might have triggered some kind of memory leading to his lineage. Perhaps not.

He had a brainwave, however.

The Doctor bounced up to him, tearing out from his bigger-on-the-inside pockets a dark blue stethoscope.

Putting it to Simuss' chest, he heard the beating of a heart. Excellent.

He slid the stethoscope to the boy's right...


	6. E1C6: Admiral Ackbar

There it was.

A second heartbeat.

The rhythm of time, pumping through this boy's veins, coursing through him.

The Doctor looked up to Simuss. He had no idea. Blank face, expectant eyes and quivering mouth. He needed to know. He had to.

But the Doctor couldn't find any words. He could barely keep his lip from shaking.

Moving the stethoscope away from the boy's chest, he looked Simuss directly in the eye and, with grace and nobility, and a desperate eagerness, took the boy in his arms, lifting him off the floor.

'You're a Time Lord, Simuss. You're a...' he couldn't say it again.

It was as though a silent, heavy lift that had been stretching his heart strings was starting to lift, slowly, more so with every passing moment. Every thought he laid onto it the weight alleviated.

This boy was in a TARDIS, stuck outside the Universe. That's why he had never been felt, no other Time Lord had ever been found. Locked away. Hidden from reality, stuck in this cave.

'Time Lord?' Simuss asked. 'That sounds important...' he didn't sound happy, nor was he upset. He didn't sound like anything.

'Like me. Time Lord, like me.'

'You? The Doctor. Handyman of the universe. And we just happened to stumble across each other?'

The Doctor thought back, to what had lead him here.

He'd heard about this place just on his travels. It was nothing. He came here on a whim. A tourist trip. Nothing.

The chances of him having passed by this place and gone on to a different attraction where infinite. This shouldn't have happened, yet it had. He'd found another.

He hugged Simuss, breathing in the air around him. This TARDIS, it would have been on Gallifrey at some point. That boy would have touched the Citadel, walked its halls, obeyed its rules. He held him tight, in the bright hall which they were supposed to be following.

The Doctor stood with new authority, no longer lost. He was in control. His shoulders rolled as he released Simuss and stared down the corridor, taking a long, deep breath and letting a smile fall across his face.

'Want to ask you what happened,' he said to Simuss. 'I wish I could ask you how you got here, if this is your TARDIS or someone elses. If there were others. TARDIS ships were meant for several pilots, after all. I want to ask you everything you know, but I can't. Not yet.'

'I couldn't tell you,' Simuss said. 'I don't remember.'

'And we'll figure out why not in a little while, okay?'

'Alright.'

'For now, we get out.'

'What about the shadows?'

'We go the hell through them, Simuss. We fix this TARDIS. A little do-er-up-er and she'll be good as new. The shadows are threats, nothing more. Just stupid, pathetic threats that the TARDIS is setting up against us in an attempt to keep us here.'

'Why?'

'I have no idea. I've stopped caring. I just want to get out. Chances are we'll find out at some point what the reason is that this TARDIS wants us to stay. Likely there's a damn good reason, too.'

'Where do we go after we leave?'

'We'll figure that out when we get there, Sim!'

And with that, the Doctor burst into a full-on sprint, chasing the corridors, back-tracking every twist and turn, every lift and dip in the path, following that map he had so easily made earlier, for convenience sake. Simuss kept up, his legs able to take the strain of shifting dirt under each step and keeping up the pace for whatever distance he had to until the Doctor stopped, paused, and thought.

Simuss saw, however, in the Doctor eyes that there was more. Something else plaguing him. Hell, he'd only met him ten minutes ago, but he was already helping in ways he could have never have hoped for alone. how long had he spent in the darkness, feeling the shadows shifting around him, hearing lonely souls wander into the pitch black caves and fall to hunger, thirst, loneliness.

That was it, he realised.

That was what was plaguing the Doctor.

That was the reason he had been lifted off his feet, why his eyes were glistening with hope and why he had burst into confidence and energy at one little revelation. He was alone, truly alone. And Simuss had changed that.

Even so, there must be more. Something he wasn't being told. This mad, sprinting man didn't seem the type to just leave. To figure out something halfway, then find a present and just run off with it. From what he'd seen, Simuss knew this much - the Doctor wanted to help. But to what extent? Would he just be happy with getting him out and leaving, or would he come back to sort out this ship? Would he go even further, and try to figure out _why_ the TARDIS was trying to hold them in, and then had suddenly given them a clear track back to where they wanted to be?

'Doctor,' Simuss said as they ran, knowing it was something he should bring up. Perhaps the Doctor was slightly lost in the happy fuzz of finding kin. 'Why did the shadow give us a way back?'

The Doctor stopped in his tracks, slapped in the face by this sudden revelation. It was ridiculous, he thought, that he hadn't thought of it. He'd been distracted, of course, but still. Stupid, stupid stupid.

And now he had no clear direction.

The Doctor turned on the spot, watching the corridors for signs of malicious shadows creeping up on them, but there was nothing. No change. No lights going out. Nothing.

They continued on, slowly now, with the Doctor still silent.

Simuss wondered why this was. Maybe the Doctor was better at thinking when he was silent. Either that or he was trying not to think at all, trying not to over-complicate it. If he really was as lonely as Simuss thought, then maybe he just wanted to revel in this moment. To feel brotherhood and only brotherhood. No panic, no suspicion, no off-feeling that you get in your stomach when something happens but your brain hasn't quite figured out what it is yet.

Funny, really. Simuss had that feeling at the exact moment he thought about what having that feeling meant.

It meant that this was a trap. It was all a trap.

Of course the Doctor, still with a stupid smile, attempting to keep the atmosphere light said 'It's a trap!' in an odd, sort-of gurgling voice.

'What?' Simuss just stared at him.

'It's my best Admiral Ackbar,' the Doctor said, genuinely defensive. 'You don't think it's any good, do you. And I've been working on it for-'

The lights went out.


	7. E1C7: Rude

'Ah,' the Doctor said. 'This is an issue.'

'And issue?' Simuss' voice was high, on the edge of panicking. He was doing a rather incredible job of keeping it together, the Doctor realised. He had spent so long hiding from the shadows.

He instantly started to sonic upwards, aiming at some lights above, trying to lock on. Arms swinging, he couldn't find anything in the dark. He damned himself for not keeping a closer eye on where the lights were exactly - he couldn't even remember if they were definitely above them.

'Doctor?' Simuss called for him, sounding as though he had shrunk to the floor.

The Doctor crouched to be as close to him as possible. He didn't want to lose this boy - not after the amount of people who had been lost down here.

'Have you any idea what he is?' the shadows asked, their voices dark and full of knowledge, despite asking questions. 'Simuss, do you know what this man is?'

'The Doctor,' he said, as though he were answering a teacher in a classroom. 'He's the Doctor.'

'He's a killer,' it said. 'He's a genocidal, lonely God who picks up poor humans and drops them when he's sucked them dry. Am I right, Doctor?'

'Good thing I'm not human,' Simuss said.

It felt wrong, what happened after that moment.

The whole room burst back into light, and the sound of shuffling feet leaving filled their ears again. The shadows were real, living creatures. Physical, not spectral. That must mean something.

'Why do I feel like it wanted us to tell it that?' the Doctor said out loud, not really expecting Simuss to answer.

'Because they were cleverer than us,' he answered. 'They twisted me into giving them a snippet of information I shouldn't have.'

'But why. Why give us a way back here?'

'Maybe... I don't know.'

'Maybe what?'

'Nothing. Really, nothing. I said 'maybe' hoping an idea would come to me, Doctor, because I'm really scared and probably mentally compromised. I have memories loss and I'm not human even though I feel like I should be. I'm freaking out.'

'Plus, there are shadows in an alien ship that, according to everything I know and believe, can't exist.'

'Why not?'

The Doctor stopped. Would he have to tell Simuss about the War? Was that something he could do. Simuss, being here, must have been from before the Time War began, meaning he has no idea what happened. How would he react?

He remembered telling the Master - how he'd gone into denial, and then, later, had attempted to bring Gallifrey itself back. Was it smart to do that to another person? To give them their identity and their solitude back-to-back.

'Because they were all destroyed, Simuss,' he said. 'In a war. A Time War.'

This was it, he was going to tell this boy everything. He had to.

Simuss looked barely 18, but for a Time lord that could be 1800. Maybe he would be able to cope. Maybe he'd have the strength.

'A Time War?' he asked, innocently.

'Hell.' They sat together, in the new light. 'Burning, stinking hell.' He took a deep breath, his brow low over his eyes and his hair hanging, devoid of it's usual bounce from sweat. 'I ended it,' he said. 'I ended the whole thing.'

'How did you do it?'

'By killing everyone. Every Time lord. Me and you, we're the last. No one else. Well, a woman named River is kind-of Time lord, but that's about it.'

'River?'

'River Song. Professor River song. Archeologist. She died. I watched. Everyone seems to do that, but hey, everything ends. That's how the universe works, isn't it. Everything dies. And that's good, I suppose.'

'But you're alive,' Simuss said, somewhere between being doubtful and reassuring. 'Surely that counts for something?'

'I try to make it, Sim.' The Doctor took a heavy breath and stood up, helping simuss to his own feet. 'Try to make a difference. Do good. But sometimes I feel like I'm just making things worse.'

'Well, you're helping me. Yesterday I was just in a cave, lost next to a glowing pillar. Without a name or a friend or a species. I was alone, and no there's you.'

'I know the feeling,' the Doctor said with a smile. 'Now, let's get to that console room.'

The two of them followed the rocky cavern to the next corner, where the blue light of the console was starting to become visible again. They followed the tunnel until the rocky surface seemed to start to merge with metal - the two solid materials twisted and twined on the ceiling and down the walls as they approached the crystal pillar in the console room.

The hall-like opening was huge, tall and cold, which echoed with the blue light that illuminated it. Now, however, they saw the shadows in the corner - one of the the corridors heading away from the console was drenched in darkness. The shivers and twitches of shifting darkness that made no sense whatsoever.

It dragged a shiver up the Doctor's spine.

Simuss avoided looking at them directly at all.

'What are you doing here?' the Doctor asked the shadows. He didn't look at them, however. He simply scanned the cave entrance that he had first came through, looking for any signs of it being a doorway.

'Here to help,' it said. 'I have been here for a long while. Observing.'

'Why would you want us out?' the Doctor asked. 'A minute ago you were calling me genocidal. I take offence to that, plus it kind of implies you don't like me. Rude, by the way. Very rude.'

'I want out of this prison.'

'For what purpose?'

'Freedom.'

'Well, you were all 'the only fault is life' - what was that all about?'

'Truth. The only fault is life, but it is not my place to determine how people live. Life is so easily misspent, especially down here. Within these caves, we might as well be dead.'

'What would you do?'

'Travel. Watch the universe in all it's perfections. In all it's faults.'

'Is this a trap?' Simuss asked. 'Are you trying to talk us into releasing you?'

'Release?' it said, actually sounding offended. 'You make me sound like an animal.'

'You're a creature. A killer.'

'I have not murdered anyone.'

'All those people, all those hopeless, lost people who came into the caves. What happened to them?!' Simuss yelled, getting angry again.

The shadows fell silent, not wanting to answer. Perhaps they were killers.

'Help us,' the Doctor said. 'Then, and only then, do we discuss you getting-'

'No,' Simuss said, killing the Doctor's sentence. 'It tells us everything. What happened to them. What happened to me. What is in this box?'

He held it up and the shadows seemed to hide away, shifting back.

'What is it?' he demanded.


	8. E1C8: Spring the Lock

'What's in the box?!' Simuss screamed, demanding an answer. His eyes were wide and accusing, searching for some twist, some sign from the shadows.

'Would rather know what that is, or where they went?' the shadows asked, turning the tide. It's ambiguous, androgynous voice had an authority that made it difficult for Simuss to hold his own, but he tried. He held.

'Fine,' he said. 'First, you tell us where they went. What happened to them. What you did-'

'We did nothing!' it roared. 'We did nothing to them. We watched you become more... this place, the Doctor calls it a TARDIS, it is what attacked them. You.'

'Me?' Simuss was quiet now, no longer in a yelling match. He was thinking. He wanted all the answers. For so long, he was in the dark, hopeless. Now the Doctor had shown him light, he was greedy for it and he didn't care. He wanted to know. 'How do you know the Doctor's name?'

'It is one of three things we were born knowing,' it said. 'The first was to find the Doctor. His name rang in our ears before we had opened our eyes. Doctor. We knew you upon sight regardless of your changing face.'

'Yes, well, I have a very definitive persona,' he said with a perfectly straight face.

'What was the second?' Simuss ordered.

'The box. It should not be opened, not until the right time. It is not ready yet. It needs to know what will happen when the TARDIS attacks those who wander into it.'

'What's inside?'

'We don't know,' it said, honestly. 'We only know it is not ready yet.'

'When will it be ready?' the Doctor asked.

'Once it has seen all it need to.'

'Third,' Simuss ordered, wanting to know everything he could about this place. 'What is third?'

'That we are it's eyes,' the shadows said. 'We are, in some way linked to that box. Whatever is inside, it cannot act on it's own. It manipulated this TARDIS to act on it's behalf, taking wanderers and changing them.'

'Any wanderers?' the doctor asked.

'Only humans,' is said, slowly, thinking about it. 'Only ever humans. They seem to be drawn to this place.'

'I was drawn here,' the Doctor said. 'Subtly, but there was always something. Pulling me into the dark. Anyway, if you are it's eyes, what have you seen?'

'What happened?' Simuss asked, softer now. More wary of what the answer could be.

'Humans would wander in, and we would watch them be changed. The TARDIS, it would attack them, and they would emerge. New. A new fear in them, we could feel it, but we never did anything.'

'You're talking as though... oh,' the Doctor nodded, hand closing over his mouth. 'Oh...' he looked at Simuss, a quizzical look. 'Is it possible?'

'Is what possible?' Simuss asked. 'That I'm a Time Lord? Why am I a Time Lord if they were all human. What am I doing here?!'

'You were changed, Simuss,' the shadows said. 'You are human, but you are not.'

'It's called a chameleon arch,' the Doctor said, his voice low. 'I've used one before. Once. To become human. It rewrites your biology, alters every cell, your basic, fundamental physiology changes.'

'Into what?'

'Time Lord.'

Simuss looked at the shadows, which seemed to have shrunken away, ashamed. 'I'm human?' he asked, looking at the Doctor.

'Not right now,' he said. 'For some reason, whatever is in this box was luring in humans and changing them into Time Lords and then... what?'

There was a silence.

'Are you talking to us?' the shadows asked.

'Well, you're the eyes, what happened?' Where did they go, once they had changed in Time Lords what happened?!'

'The lost their memories. They wandered into the dark, after cowering.'

'They went against their fears and walked into the darkness,' the Doctor said, thinking. 'Someone created Time Lords, that's impossible. It is completely not possible. No law of physics would allow it.'

'Why not?' Simuss asked. 'You were human.'

'That's different, going from Time Lord to human is like regression. Humans and Time Lords share lineage, were' like cousin species. We're the older cousin, we came first, so becoming human is like winding forward the clock, pushing evolution in a specific direction within parameters that are set by biology. But going backwards in evolution only ever results in -' He stopped dead. 'Wait... wait, while I was human my consciousness was locked inside a watch. A little fob watch.' The Doctor span to the shadows, accusingly. 'Is there anywhere that their human spirits could have been locked in?'

'The box?' Simuss offered.

'No, the box is the controlling entity. This needs locked up. There would be somewhere else- but no. No there won't.'

'I'm lost,' Simuss said, not following.

'It's clever, annoyingly clever. I could save them, turn them back into humans, turn on the light and fix this door and we'd all be okay. Give them back their memories, their lives. YOur life, Simuss.'

'Why can't you?'

'Because they're in the box. Whatever it is, it locked them in with it. That's why you knew my name, shadows. Whatever is in here, it knows me. It knows I could figure it out. All of this. Figure out that the only way to save them is to let it out. I can't trap it, that would mean trapping the human spirits.'

'What, so whatever did this is in there, with my memories?'

'And countless others, swimming around together.'

'And if you let out my memories, you let out the big bad monster that trapped them in there.'

'Yeah.'

'Why? What's the point in trapping yourself in a box. This is a huge plot, a plan that doesn't make any sense to me.'

'Maybe it didn't choose to be in the box. It found some leakage, a way to control the TARDIS, psychically. It's strong enough mentally to literally create creatures of shadow to do it's bidding. It didn't choose to get in, but it can force me to spring the lock.'

'Will you?' the shadows asked.

'I might have to,' the Doctor said. 'It's the only way to save all those people, somewhere down in the caves. Save their memories.'


	9. E1C9: Stained and Tainted

'Do they need their memories?' Simuss asked, his brow furrowed and his arms crossed. He was trying to come up with a suggestion, any suggestion, that might save people without letting out whatever did this to them.

'Do you want yours?' the Doctor asked. 'All those human little experiences. First kiss, first dance, going to school, getting bullied, falling in love. All of that, everything people go through, do you want it back?'

'Of course I do, but do I need it? Is it worth it? Letting out whatever's in there, it could be disastrous. It knows you, Doctor. You and your ship and your life, it knows. That means you've seen it before, but you didn't kill it or stop it. You don't know how it got in there - someone else trapped it. It beat you, and now it's going to get out by beating you again.'

'You assume I haven't got a plan, young Simuss,' the Doctor chimed, inspecting the box in one hand.

'Great! You seem to have done rather well so far, can we get out?'

'Well, now you're assuming I have one,' he said, only half paying attention. He was more interested in the box.

'What, so you don't have a plan?'

'Of course not, who told you I did?'

'You did!'

'No, I said you assumed I didn't. Doesn't mean I do. There are no inscriptions on this thing. Nothing.'

'So?'

'So whoever was trying to hold this thing in new it was powerful. Didn't want it getting out.'

'Would it make a difference?'

'Absolutely. If it's Time Lord, that would explain the TARDIS, but it might not be. This TARDIS might have been used to ship this thing, nothing more. It's an old model, it was probably stolen. Transport, nothing more. Whoever built this didn't want us knowing. The more we know, the stronger we are.'

'And if we're clueless?'

'Then we're powerless.' The Doctor lowered the box from his gaze. 'But we're not clueless.'

'We're not?' the shadows asked.

SImuss and the Doctor both stopped and stared at the shadows, the Doctor sporting a small smile.

'What?'

'Just... you know. Big threat, you're part of the monster. The box is watching us through you, shadows, and yet you're using 'we'?'

'Well, I thought you could help us...'

'I can,' the Doctor said. 'It just might shock you what's best.'

'What's best?' Simuss asked, not taking his eyes off the shadows.

'What's best for us all. For the shadows. For you, Simuss. The people, lost down there.'

'You think they're still down there?'

'We have to hope,' the Doctor said. 'They could have survived without food if they were Time Lord. Bigger reserves. They'd be fine for weeks.'

'But there might have been people down here for months. Years, even.'

'How long has this cave been here?'

'No idea. It was only discovered a few years ago. I suppose people assumed it was always here.'

'See that?' the Doctor asked, pointing directly at Simuss's forehead. 'Did you see that, box?'

'What the hell are you on about?!'

'You, Simuss,' he said, almost accusingly. 'Your memory. You didn't remember your own first name half an hour ago, but now it's all 'a few years ago' and 'people'. You're getting them back. Slowly, but surely.'

'What does that mean?'

'It's incentive,' he said, his eyes shutting. 'It's the box. It's showing that it has the power to give back the memories, giving you snippets of your own life. It's a message.'

'And you're going to do it.'

'Am I? That sounds like a decision, not a question.'

'Just do it, Doctor.'

He held up the box, looking at it with some reservations. It was tough, wood-like to look at, but it felt almost like leather. There was a small latch on the front, with a lime-green gem, round and soft encrusted inside.

He pressed it.

_Click_.

The top flipped over.

For a second, there was nothing.

After that second, a great wave of yellow-white light burst from the contents - streams of it, all coming from separate clock faces inside the box. There must have been at least thirty time-faces, all embedded in the odd wood-leather, pouring out this stained light. It disappeared down the caverns, different streams taking different routes, each searching for it's own host. Looking for their own bodies.

One found Simuss, swallowing his face in a cloud of yellowed light, finding it's way inside through his eyes, ears, nose, mouth. He collapsed to the floor, hitting his head and falling asleep, and yet the light still poured into him. It filled him.

Yet, from the box, there was another shade. A darker, emerald shade of light that echoed the lime green clasp on the box, but it was tainted with black and grey, making it seem dirty. Dirty and old.

The shadows, now behind the Doctor, dispersed, becoming nothing more than black smoke that filtered into the green light as it collected above the box, which had been dropped onto the floor.

It's light clouded that which emanated from the TARDIS console and the yellow light coming from all around. It dominated the space around it, eating it and consuming it. Swallowing it.

It formed a human-like shape above the box once the yellow light had cleared.

Simuss was still asleep, out from his fall.

The green figure seemed to look at them, it's features ghostly and non-specific. It lunged at the Doctor, screamed at him, and then shrouded him in it's fog.

Suddenly there was no more TARDIS.

No more cold.

The air was warm and dry, a breeze hitting him.

The Doctor attempted to open his eyes, but they wouldn't obey him from the light. He waited for his squinting eyes to adjust before even attempting to look around, but he instantly saw Simuss, on the ground next to him, bathing in light.

He could see a few other bodies, all dispersed over the desert.

He noticed the red suit he had left behind at some point. He couldn't really remember taking it off.

He couldn't really remember much of what had happened within the caves.

But he knew something was coming. Something knew him, and he had set it free.

With it's own TARDIS.


	10. E2C1: A Desert Storm

Lifting his head from the dirt, the Doctor felt the heat burning his back against the orange felt ground. This stupid moon was bloody hot and he was sick of it already.

His steadied himself up on his elbows, looking around at all of the people he could see on the desert ground, moaning in the heat as they woke up.

Simuss stirred, looking back up at the Doctor and looking around himself. They arose together, seeing the plain of bodies, shifting as their brains attempted to figure out the memories, as their bodies shape back into their original species. Time Lord to Human.

Simuss ran to the nearest person as they struggled up - it was a young woman, maybe in her late teens - and helped her to her feet. The Doctor did the same for an old man to his left, then a young man a little further out. Soon enough they were helping each other up, and the Doctor quickly realised that they were looking to him for information. He didn't know why, and he presumed that they didn't either. People, in times of trouble, just seem to look to the person they think might know something - out of trust or suspicion. He hoped it was trust.

There was maybe fifty of them. More than he had expected, and after a while they were all staring at him. The funny man in the bow tie with floppy hair. Everyone else was wearing some kind of gear, be it a cave-diving jumpsuit, a sliver over-all with navy blue or a slightly confusing fishnet-esque body-covering suit.

Sure enough, they were all human, and he had them in a large circle in a few minutes, with the Doctor standing on a small rock just to show his status of knowing possibly a little more than the rest of them.

'Hello humans!' he said, slapping a smile upon his own face. 'Do we know where we are?'

'Is this Gug?' said a man, maybe in his forties with a large beard that masked most of his face.

'It is!' The Doctor pointed and smiled. 'Gug, a little desert moon with, anyone?'

'A cave system that was a scientific mystery,' said a woman in her sixties. 'I'm guessing we're all explorers. What happened?'

'I can tell you,' the Doctor said with some reservations in his voice. 'But you'll have to bear with me. It gets a little complicated.'

'There was a box,' Simuss said, solidifying the Doctor's hope that he would have kept his memories. 'A box with something inside.'

'As do most boxes,' the teenage girl smirked.

'It was a box that I couldn't recognise,' the Doctor said. 'Which is odd. I'm a traveller. I've seen a lot of boxes, but this one was different. Untraceable, and locked within it was something that changed all of you.'

'Changed us into what?' came a voice.'

'Why are we listening to this?' came another.

'This guy's a nutter, look at his shoes!'

'What's wrong with my shoes?' the Doctor muttered. He quickly shook his head, snapping out of it. 'Look, you were changed, your memories were wiped and then I fixed it, but to fix it and save you and your memories, I had to open the box. Releasing whatever was inside.'

'Where the hell are the caves?' asked a woman. She looked outwards, into the desert - it was almost flat. Nought but sand and rock.

'They left with the monster,' Simuss said. 'It wasn't really a cave, it was a ship. A spaceship, called a TARDIS.'

'A spaceship disguised as a cave?' asked a random crowdling.

'A spaceship disguised as a cave,' the Doctor repeated. He smiled. 'The thing in the box used it to draw you in, transform you, store your memories in the box so that I had to let it out to let them out and save you, returning you to Humanity.'

'So... you let it out?' asked someone.

'To save you. Don't get me started, I know, it's all 'was that the right choice' or 'pros versus cons'. I know.'

'So what the hell are you going to do about it?' asked the teenage girl.

'Well, I'm going to take you all home,' he said. 'Then me and Simuss, if he's willing, will travel to the 21st century to pick up a friend of mine, Clara. Then, we're going to track the green figure all across the Universe.'

'I thought you said the box was untraceable?' Simuss whispered, seemingly agreeing to the proposal.

'We're not tracking the box,' the Doctor smiled. 'We're tracking the TARDIS.' He straightened up and addressed the group of Humans. 'My ship, my own TARDIS is back in the town, over there,' he said, pointing to a barely visible group of buildings off in the distance. 'It can go anywhere, anywhen. I'll take you all home. You can set down, have a cuppa, go back to your lives.'

'But what do we say, to our families?' a man asked. 'I've been in that cave for weeks. What do I say to my family? They were waiting for me in the town, would they still be here?'

'I don't know,' the Doctor said. 'I guess we'll find out. You direct us then, sir.'

'My name is Harper,' he said, his voice gruff but worried. 'You say the town is that way?'

'It is!' The Doctor watched Harper walk past his little bolder and hopped off, following him to the town.

Harper lead the groups of humans, along with the Doctor, towards Gug's tourist town. Gus, the sun, hung high in the sky - it was nowhere hear morning nor night. The town's shadow was short and sharp, and as the group of fifty stepped into the shade they felt the temperature drop. It didn't feel completely natural, that kind of drop in temperature. The Doctor had experienced it before, many times; when a planet or moon is exposed on one side to the sun more than the other, it starts to scorch the surface. Now the dirt of Gug was starting to burn. That wasn't right...

'What's this?' Harper yelled as he disappeared into a building. 'Everyone's gone!'

'Where is everyone?' came a voice.

Soon the whole lot of them burst into an outrage, a howling mass of panicking humans. Great.

'Everyone-' the Doctor was completely ignored.

'People, will you-' Simuss tried, but he was yelled at by someone who shut him up completely.

Soon the sounds of people blaming eachother broke out. FIghting and rowing, all vocal. Then there was a fist. A slap.

Then they all stopped blaming eachother, and they looked to the man in the funny bowtie.

'Who the hell are you?', 'Why do you know so much?', 'How come he gets all the answers?'

'Okay, everyone-' he tried, but they yelled and howled, not letting him speak. 'Everyone, please. Oh for the love of- EVERYONE, SHUT UP!'

The crowd fell silent.

'Thank you. Now. The plan...'

The Doctor started thinking. This was going to have to be good.


	11. E2C2: Back in the Game

Fifty of them, all staring up at him. One hundred watchful, impatient eyes. A couple of mutters.

He swallowed.

'The plan,' he said, 'is for me to go and collect my friend. She's very good, and she'll be able to help me help you.'

'Why, can't you do it?' asked someone.

'Not on my own. Don't function well on my own. I tend to get... thoughtful.'

'Thoughtful?' asked Harper. 'My family is gone and you're worried about getting too thoughtful?'

'You haven't seen my thoughts,' the Doctor said. Moving on. 'Now, once we're back, you're going to take me, my friend Clara and Simuss around this town and show us the last place you saw your families, friends, anyone you came with. People are disappearing. We need to find them, okay?'

'I should have thought so!' Harper yelled, getting aggressive. Humans. So sentimental. How wonderful it must feel to just expect people to be around like that.

'Right then,' the Doctor said. 'I'll be back soon.'

'You hold on there!' someone yelled. It was a woman, in her thirties, with a thin face and intrusive eyes. 'We don't know if you're coming back. I saw someone should go with you, make sure you come back and help us.'

'Trust me,' the Doctor said. 'I'm the Doctor.'

'I don't give half a damn whether you're a nurse or a vet or a bloody paleontologist,' she snarked, 'someone is going with you. Harper?'

'I'll go with the man,' Harper said, stepping forward.

'Okay, awesome!' the Doctor said. Harper scowled. 'Simuss, you stay here and keep everyone comfortable. I shouldn't be long!'

Simuss sighed and turned to the crowd. They watched him with eagle eyes that made the Doctor feel almost sorry for leaving him. Almost, because he knew he would be back soon, and he'd have to deal with them.

'Is this the sort of situation you usually find yourself in... what was your name?'

'I'm the Doctor, and yes, it is actually. This is what I do. Track down strange mysteries, solve them, save people.'

'With help.'

'Usually. Lately, I'll be honest, it's been a lot of people going missing. I figured that they were all in the caves, but it seems there's a new dimension to this mystery. Heh.' He laughed at his little 'dimension' joke, fully knowing that no-one would either get it nor care. That made him sad.

'So you though my family had followed me into the cave?' Harper asked as he and the Doctor moved through the town towards his own, lovely TARDIS. 'Why would they?'

'If they went looking for you. Or they were told to...' he started to think. Could this be to do with the green figure?

'Told to?' he asked. 'What would tell them to, your box-ghost.'

'Possibly,' he said. 'Although it doesn't make that much sense. Not yet, anyway.'

'Yet?'

'Well, this is mystery, Harper. New things reveal themselves around every corner. Every turn is a new clue. A new discovery.'

'You do this too much,' Harper said. 'You're starting to enjoy it.'

'I get told that a lot,' the Doctor admitted.

'Then why still do it? Why do you still help people if you know it's just going to twist you to the point where you enjoy it, even.'

'Because I, occasionally, manage to make a difference. For good.'

'Do you intend to do good this time?'

'I thought is was going good, yeah,' he said, smiling as they reached the TARDIS. 'Here we are!'

Harper looked unimpressed.

'It's a box,' he said. 'It's not even a pretty box.'

'I think she's sexy,' the Doctor muttered. He realised what he'd said, his eye widening, but to his mercy Harper didn't respond.

The Doctor moved on, unlocking the door. 'Anyway, have a look inside. Much more impressive, I think you'll find.'

Harper sniffed and pushed the door inwards, and smirked. 'It says pull to open,' he said. The Doctor grimaced.

Harper stepped inside and the Doctor heard him take a breath, and he looked around. 'It's...'

'Bigger?'

'A different place...' said Harper, thinking. He was pulling it apart, in his head, breaking it down. 'New dimension. I'm guessing the door is a dimensional transference device?'

'Something along those lines,' the Doctor said. 'Right then. To Earth!'

'Earth?' Harper asked, looking confused. 'What are you talking about? That place has burned!'

'Time Machine,' the Doctor said, winking. 'Handy as hell. I'll go and pick up Clara, we'll only be gone a few seconds to Gug, but for us it could be minutes.' He started dancing around the console, flicking switches and hitting buttons. 'Off we pop!'

'I don't think I like this,' Harper said just before he was flung off his feet by the TARDIS' momentum.

'No one does!' the Doctor yelled, laughing maniacally as they span towards Earth - 2013.

They landed suddenly and painfully (for Harper, at least) in Clara's front garden. The Doctor left Harper to recuperate and, by the time he was off the grey floor, the Doctor was back inside with a girl who looked like she'd been waiting for this for too long.

'Harper, Clara, Clara, Harper,' the Doctor said, smiling. 'Now then, we have to find out what's happening with this green figure.'

'Okay, so, green ghost thing inside a TARDIS, caves that aren't caves and people going missing?' Clara asked.

The Doctor nodded. 'To sum it up, yeah. You back in, or do you need more time?'

'I wouldn't have let you bring me out if is wasn't,' she smiled.

The Doctor gave her a grin as she readied herself. Harper cut out the middleman and lay back down, closing his eyes. He hated flying anyway. This was hell.

Clara threw her head back, loving it. She'd missed this. She knew it was needed, her break from it all. She'd watched a version of herself be shot and killed, and her lover walk her into the edge of reality itself, so she was due a holiday.

But this felt so right, being back in the TARDIS.

On a job, working a mystery.

Back in the game.


	12. E2C3: Hey-Ho!

They landed just as harshly as they had set off, and the Doctor lead Clara out, helping Harper of the floor and out the door.

Out the doors, Clara was greeted to a loud, unhappy group of people in very tatty clothing with dust on their faces. And a crying boy.

As they appeared from the box, the crying boy latched himself to the Doctor.

'They've gone mad!' he cried.

'Yes!' one of the crowd yelled. 'We bloody well have! My family's gone missing, my child is gone and you swan off in your box to collect your friend?!'

'Well,' the Doctor nodded. 'I did take Harper. He watched. Didn't deviate for a second.'

'What's all this?' Clara asked, pointing at the crying boy.

'Oh, this is Simuss,' he said, patting him. 'That's the angry mob, Harper's behind you and everyone else is missing. Hey-ho!'

Clara mouthed 'hey-ho', trying to work out whether he had genuinely thought it was a good idea.

She rolled her eyes as the Doctor walked out, into the now silent group. Fifty of them, falling silent in front of them. He smiled.

'Well, any ideas?' he asked.

They blinked.

'What are you doing?' Clara asked him, quietly.

'Asking them. They're right, I know things they don't, but I've told them everything about this that I do. They know what I know. So. Any ideas? Where do you think your wife is, Harper?'

'I don't know, you're supposed to tell me!'

'Am I? I thought I was just a funny man in a bow tie, right?'

'Maybe you are, but my family is missing and you're all we have.'

'So? Tell me. What are your thoughts?'

Harper fell silent, thinking. 'You said that the green... thing. In the cave. It changed us to a different species. Why?'

'To hold you ransom,' Simuss said. 'So it could get out.'

'What if it took more than it needed?' Harper asked. 'Would it take my family? Is there any other reason someone would want... what was it called?'

'Time Lord,' the Doctor said. 'And that's what I was thinking. Very good Harper. This is no longer a exploration, Simuss, it's a rescue mission.'

'So... we need to find the green figure.'

'Which means tracking it's TARDIS. Like I said. Just saying. Called it.'

'Right, off your high-horse you,' Clara said. 'You called me in, what do you need?'

'Yes, right. Clara. I need you to help these lovely people.'

'...and?'

'That's it,' he nodded. 'I'm going to have to chase down this TARDIS-wielding rogue, I need someone to look after them.'

'...You're kidding me.'

'Of course I am, you're sticking with me.'

She gave him a look. It was a fun look, with a hint of frustration. She'd missed this.

'Now then,' the Doctor said. 'I'm going to leave now. I'm not your boss, you can do whatever you want, but if you go home your families will turn up there. If you stay here, I'll bring them back here.'

'How do you expect us to go anywhere?' Harper asked, looking around at the scorched town.

'Well... I guess you'll just have to stay then,' the Doctor said. 'And wait.'

'Wait?!' Harper yelled.

The Doctor took a breath. 'Harper, look. I have been doing this just about all of my adult life. I'm over a thousand years old. I have a few centuries of experience behind me. I'm clever and good and reliable and I would never let a creature like this take people. Simple take them. It's madness! and you don't trust me because you're scared and human and that's fine, it really is. But I have to ask - if I told you that there was literally no one better suited to finding everybody who's gone missing in this town than me, would you trust them in my hands?'

'Well,' Harper said. 'It seems to me that they're not in your hands, are they?'

'They will be. And I'll be back,' he said as he and Clara stepped away, back towards the TARDIS. 'Simuss, you coming?'

Simuss hopped after them, giving a curious look back at the crowd.

'Are they going to be okay?'

'No idea,' the Doctor said. 'They were annoying me.'

'You really do have a huge ego, don't you?' Clara smiled.

The Doctor replied with a smile, and then started flicking controls. 'Best thing we can do is try and chase down that TARDIS. Where ever it's gone, it's likely that the people who've gone missing are there, too.'

'Do we know that for certain?' Simuss asked, holding a rail, nervous.

'Not for certain, but it's all we have at the minute. We can maybe find it's next landing place, if we're lucky...'

'How do we know where to start?' Clara asked. 'There is pretty much infinite space and time, it could have gone anywhere.'

'If you had all of time and space to explore, and you'd been locked in a cave for God-knows how long, where would you go?'

Clara though for a second, before smiling quietly. 'Home.'

'Exactly!' He stopped. 'Except, we don't know where it's home is.'

'So... how does that help us?'

'We know it would have gone straight there, in a line. Easy to find. One long, streak of old Artron energy from the TARDIS that doesn't match this one. I'll start scanning now,' he smiled as he bounced a button. 'Shouldn't take too long.'

'Any theories?' Simuss asked.

'What if it's someone you already know?' Clara asked. 'Like, a Time lord.'

'Couldn't be, Time War and everything.'

'But you said that the dimension change inside the TARDIS was the reason you couldn't sense me being a Time Lord, what if it did it for the green thing?' Simuss chimed.

'Well-'

'Or it could be a TARDIS itself,' Clara offered. 'They seem to be fairly temperamental, plus one has been 'humanised' before, right?'

The TARDIS gave a hum, almost in agreement.

'That's a good-'

'Or it could be a monster, good and simple,' Simuss suggested.

'Where do monsters live?' Clara asked.

'In the dark?'

'Are we helping?'

'I don't think so.'

'Look,' the Doctor interrupted, eyes closed and breathing deeply. 'We know where it's gone.'

They stared at him, waiting to know.

He smiled. 'It's gone home.'


	13. E2C4: Leaky

'Home?' Clara and Simuss both asked, equally dumbfounded expressions on their faces.

'Home! Don't you see?!' The Doctor looked at them, expecting a response. When they didn't give any, he didn't sag, as Clara had been expecting. Instead, his face lit up and he brightened, relishing the chance to explain himself. 'We're inside a TARDIS!' he said, grinning.

They paused.

Eventually Clara said, 'We know.'

The Doctor looked up, at the console of his own TARDIS and shook his head. 'Not this one. A big one. Bigger on the inside.'

Clara's eyes shifted. 'We're inside a TARDIS, inside a TARDIS?'

'We are. A TARDIS that dematerialised, massively expanded, and then rematerialised, swallowing Gug!'

'So... where's home?' Simuss asked.

'It's wherever the big TARDIS is headed. It did it again... inside a TARDIS, the person at the console has a lot of control over what goes on inside. Whatever it was inside that box, it used the TARDIS to swallow this moon. It's holding Gug ransom!'

'Ransom? So, we've been capture again,' Simuss deduced, deflating.

'No, no no. We can get out. We'll have a little trouble, but I have a lever I installed incase of this. Of course, last time it was my own TARDIS getting trapped inside itself, but that doesn't matter. We can get out, in this. Alternatively, we try to get the mouth of the TARDIS to open up so we can squeeze Gug out along with it's inhabitants, but that might be tricky.'

'Wait- mouth?' Clara asked, getting seriously confused.

'Mouth, door, whatever you want to call it. We'd have to program it to be huge, let out the whole moon.'

'How do you know all of this?' Simuss asked.

'The readings,' the Doctor pointed. 'They're telling me the TARDIS that green thing stole is all around us. Everywhere. And that's because it is.'

'We're in a pocket universe,' Clara said, nodding.

'Of sorts. More of a big box, really. Now, onto saving those lost tourists of Gug.' The Doctor hit a few buttons and pressed a few buttons, grinning. 'If we're going to have any chance figuring out what this thing is, or what it wants, then we'd better start by getting out of this room.'

'This... room? What? I'm lost. Sorry.' Clara bit her lip.

'This room, where the TARDIS is holding Gug. It's a simulation, the space around it, keeping it suspended. We need to get out.'

'Can we?'

'Absolutely, we just need to find out how big the room is. Tricky thing with TARDIS technology - they get pretty big pretty fast. If you leave a TARDIS in the same place, once it gets damaged, it'll start to leak. It'll grow. But only if it's damaged, usually it just sits there...'

'What?' Simuss stopped him, thinking.

'...What?'

'Leak?'

'Yeah, like...' he demonstrated with his hands, trying to make a box and then blow it up, until it encase him. 'You know, growing!'

'Leaking?'

'Yeah, the bigger-on-the-inside, it leaks outwards after damage to the system. It's fairly rare, but there you go.'

'So that's what's happened here.'

'Not necessarily, but if it is, we need to know how big it's gotten and how fast it's growing and if we can move faster to get out.'

'If not?'

'Then we find the exit, stroll into the console room. Let out Gug. Shrink the TARDIS down.'

'What about the green guy?' Clara asked.

'That's the antagonist, I suppose. And what does that imply? Come one, English, first day of class, Protagonists and Antagonists, what's the main thing?'

They were stumped.

'Change!' The Doctor beamed at them. 'They change! An Antagonist in the tale thinks it's the Protagonist of it's own story, and every Protagonist worth it's weight changes through the story.'

'I don't know where you're going with this,' Simuss stated, honestly dumbfounded.

'I don't have to go anywhere. We have to change the green figure, make it less... evil.'

'How do we do that though?' Clara asked.

'We show it what it's doing. Hopefully we can appeal to the good in it.'

'And if not? What if it just wants to kill everyone on this moon, and taking it hostage was just an easy option?'

'Then we do the dirty work ourselves,' the Doctor said with a nod, swallowing his morality. He did a lot of that.

'Dirty work?'

'I'm not suggesting killing it, but maybe trapping it? Talking to it? I don't know. We'll see.'

The Doctor smiled as he started pressing buttons again, calculating the distance the room that they were trapped within seemed to have between walls.

'Good news,' he said. 'We're in a still room. No expansion, so it'll be easy to get out of once we find the exit.'

'I feel like that's going to be the bad news.'

'Yeah. I can't find the exit.'

'Nothing?'

'Well, there are a few odd readings coming from Gug, but I'm not sure what they are... nothing to do with this. I'll look into it later.'

'Nothing to do with it?' Clara asked. 'Are we really in a place to ignore a coincidence?'

'Oh, I doubt it's a coincidence, young padawan. I just feel like we need,' he smashed the console, smiling, 'a little perspective on things. We need out.'

Simuss nodded, Clara looked unnerved, the Doctor smiled.

'You're worrying me,' Clara said.

'I think I'm worrying myself. We're here!'

'...What?'

'Here! Console room of a mini-galaxy-sized TARDIS. Wonder what it's going to look like.'

'It was like a cave earlier,' Simuss said. 'Will it still be that?'

Clara opened the door to a white-crystal, , almost liquid room. The curves and angles of the central console slid into the floor, forming a sphere of glass in the centre that stretched up to a high ceiling that curved in such a way that it was difficult to tell how high it was exactly. It seemed to go on forever.

'That's not a cave,' Clara noticed.


	14. E2C5: A New Breed

Clara's foot sounded like the ticking of a clock upon the glass-like floor. Lights and shimmers looked up at them, blank against the white and shining pillar that dances in the middle, completely still.

'No, that's not a cave,' the Doctor said, with a smile. 'It's the console room.'

Simuss and Clara both looked to the base of the pillar as it rose from the floor. There weren't any buttons or levers or anything that looked close to being used to control a spaceship.

'Where are all the controls?' Simuss asked.

'On there. On the white.'

'...But it's blank. Smooth.'

The Doctor walked over, into the centre of the huge room and started stroking the white, ceramic-looking console. As his hand traced across the shining material, lights of a soft, light blue started to appear under his fingers, squares and circles glowing, fading slowly as he moved. The blue lights echoed his hands, following his movements. He smiled.

'Look,' he said, wonder making his voice weak. 'It's beautiful.'

Simuss and Clara followed him out. Clara, enjoying the sparkling yet clear orb of a room that collected in the tall, spheric tower in front of them, moved to the Doctor's side, understanding that they had to release Gug from the heart of this TARDIS.

Simuss, however, stepped towards the door - it was a circular door that opened automatically as he approached, as you would expect inside an old sci-fi movie. It was soundless.

The three of them peered out as the door slid open, revealing the burning sun Gus as it loomed over where Gug should be, hanging in the black against the stars.

The Doctor started tapping the white console, it's invisible buttons glowing for a second as he touched them, then fading to white a second later. He was grinning like a child at Disneyland.

Clara and Simuss just stared at the sun, their eyes protected by the shields surrounding the TARDIS, feeling suddenly awfully small. And, oddly, cold.

'Any progress?' Clara called back.

'Not yet, getting there,' the Doctor said as he worked. 'This is fascinating. The creature, the thing in green, it's not physical so it doesn't need physical controls. It revamped its entire operating system for us. Wonder how that happened...' he looked at his own TARDIS, blue and beautiful, and it clicked suddenly. 'Oh you naughty girl.'

'What?' Clara asked, offended.

'Not you, silly. Her!' he nodded to the TARDIS while he kept on working.

'What did she do?' Clara asked, walking towards the blue box. 'Eh? What did you do, girl?'

'She was flirting,' the Doctor said, sounding to Clara like a disappointed, but not angry, dad. 'Flirting with another TARDIS!'

Clara stroked her. 'Do they do that?'

'Not sure. Well, apparently. I mean, she hasn't met another TARDIS in a while, must be nice to meet your kin after hundreds of years. But flirting?!' He looked to Clara, standing by her. 'I'm guessing you're on her side?'

'Of course,' Clara said. 'Girl's gotta flirt. Besides, dad, you should be happy.'

'Happy?' He thought. 'I suppose I am, actually. Nice one, girl. Getting back out there.'

'There you go, dad.'

'Do you have to call me that?'

'Guys,' Simuss called. They ignored him.

'Well, you're being all dad-y!' Clara laughed. Then she turned to Simuss, and saw him pointing.

'Guys?' Simuss called again, and now the Doctor turned his head.

'You know,' said the green figure as it hovered outside the TARDIS door, it's emerald glow intruding upon the white space, 'for a man who claims to be the 'Oncoming Storm', you are rather goofy, Doctor. Especially in this form.'

'Form?' he looked himself up and down. 'Have we met before?'

'Of course we have, don't you recognise me, Doctor?' the green figure watched him. 'Don't you see?'

'I see a floaty green thing with a TARDIS and fifty people on the surface of a moon that you've taken hostage with families that, I presume, you've also taken hostage.'

'Hostage?' it said, also sounding offended. Then it thought and said, 'I suppose, yes.'

The Doctor laughed. 'So, then, who are you. And please don't say we're going to do the guessing game. I've done that far too much. I'm old, you know.'

'Oh, I know, Doctor. I know exactly how old you are. from the first day I met you, all those years ago, back on Gallifrey, I've known exactly what you were.'

'So you are Time Lord.'

'Wasn't it obvious? I do have a TARDIS.'

'Stolen.'

'As is yours.'

'So. Who are you. The Master?'

'Too easy, don't be easy, Doctor. Though he does have a part to play, if everything goes right.'

'Oh. Great. A 'master-plan' guy. I love people like you.'

'Do you?'

'I do. You're all so full of yourselves. 'I'm going to take over the Universe', or 'kill the Doctor', or whatever evil plan you've got going.'

'Well then, I'm sure it'll take you no time to work it all out.'

'Seriously? A guessing-game?'

'I thought you were clever.'

'I am.'

'Then be clever. Exercise that big, old brain of yours.'

'Clever and lazy, that's me. Tell me what's going on.'

'Fine. I'm assuming you saw those readings coming from Gug?'

'I did.'

'Check them.'

'What about those people?'

'Find them and you can keep them.'

'What the hell does that mean?'

'I'm not trying to hurt anyone, Doctor. Well, not yet. First, I just want to see if it's possible.'

'If what's possible?'

'To make a Time Lord out of a Human.'

What that the green figure seemed to evaporate into stardust, leaving Clara, Simuss and the Doctor, each with their own versions of a particularly shocked expression.

'What do you think the master-plan is?' Clara asked eventually.

'Mass-conversion, probably. The Master tried it, kind of. This one's taking a different route. A new breed of Time Lords.'


	15. E2C6: I'm Always Fine

The Doctor flew back to the console, hitting the side and rushing his fingers across the white surface until Clara heard a loud _clunk._

'There we are,' the Doctor smiled. 'Gug back home.'

Simuss, Clara and the Doctor all looked to where the green figure had been only a moment ago, and saw the burnt-orange surface of that little desert moon.

Clara was uneasy, however. Her eyes faltered, and she looked to Simuss. She thought he might feel the same. 'Doctor,' she said.

'Yup?' he called back, his voice void of emotion.

'So it's a Time Lord?' Simuss asked under his breath. Clara nodded.

'Are you okay?' she asked the Doctor, turning to him.

'Fine. I'm always fine.'

'You say that a lot,' she said. 'I've seen your life. I know when you say that, what you really mean.'

'And what do I mean?'

'You mean you're hurt.'

'The first Time Lord I've met in a while. In spectral form, yes, but true Time Lord. Not half-human, not a metacrisis. Just Time Lord. Look what happened to them. They're always murderers, killers, wanting to be supreme. That was the Master's problem, Rassilon's problem. My problem.'

'You?'

'It's inherent, I think. To the species. To be all 'high and mighty', to feel like we can just observe all of that pain and feel nothing. Well, I started feeling the pain, so I joined in. Fought in wars, killed people, watched them kill themselves. For me. I wanted power. I wanted to be powerful. The Time Lord Supreme.'

'This again?'

'What?'

'You always get yourself into this mindset, that you're a monster. You're not. We've been through this. Doctor. You are my hero.'

'You have bad taste.'

'I have excellent taste, thank you very much. And plus, beyond that. You're my friend.'

He looked up to her, tears in his eyes that she hadn't noticed before. 'They were all killers. In the end. They murdered and slaughtered and I was the last one standing. It's coming back, all of it. I don't block it out, but some days I manage to tell myself 'it was for the best'. Everything that has happened, it's all okay because I'm still fighting. But that's just it. I'm still a warrior. A fighter.'

'You're no monster.'

'I was those two people's worst fear, back on Earth II. How often do you meet people who are someone else's worst nightmare? And now there's another.'

'Doctor,' Simuss interrupted. 'I've just met you, and I can say now, you aren't like that one. Time Lords, humans, it's all the same. Some are good. Some are bad.'

'How do you classify 'bad'? Eh? Is a murderer good? Is someone who tries to justify everything they've done and fails everyday a good man?'

'A good man is one who fights his own for what's right. A man who will go to any length he can to save the families of a stranger who sees him as nothing but a threat.'

'This is a waste of time. We're arguing over my ego when there's a Time Lord out there experimenting on innocent Humans, trying to make them into Time Lords. The Chameleon Arch isn't exactly a forgiving piece of kit. It's going to be torture.'

'How do we find them?' Clara asked.

'It gave us a clue - the readings coming from Gug,' Simuss added. 'What are they?'

'Radiation, coming from the centre. It almost resembles a... what?'

'What is it?'

'It's another TARDIS. Two of them... there's two.'

'Disguised as a moon?'

'Stuck in another dimension. There isn't a way out, so the radiation shouldn't have made it out. Seeing as we can notice it now, I'm guessing that that's where the green guy went.'

'He has another TARDIS?'

'He could get there because he's pure energy at the minute...' He paused, thinking. Clara and Simuss didn't want to interrupt him. 'Pure energy. That's it.'

'What?'

'Simuss, when you were a Time Lord, what was it like?'

'Painful. I kept having memory-loss.'

'Your mind couldn't take it. A human isn't supposed to become Time Lord, it doesn't work that way. If the figure tries it on all of those people, I don't want to think about what might happen to them. What it might do.'

'So what now?' Simuss asked.

'We go down.' The Doctor turned and bolted into his own TARDIS, stroking the wood as he passed. He liked being back where he knew how everything worked. Clara and Simuss followed, taking one last look at Gug outside, floating in front of them, happily plodding along.

Clara took a moment to wonder what they were getting into. This had upset the Doctor, made him angry and sad and motivated. All because of a little rock somewhere in the cosmos. What's more, she wondered how all of this had gone on under his nose, for so long until he'd come along, saved everyone he could, and unleashed this new threat upon everyone. If this thing could create Time Lords, invincible creatures with changing faces and two hearts, she wondered what else it could make.

She bet the Doctor was too busy thinking to think. If that made sense. He did that, missed the obvious because he was so lost in the fascinating complexity of it all. In many ways, he was more human than he thought.

_Time Lords get things wrong, too_, she thought.

Eventually, Clara joined them in the TARDIS, their TARDIS, and gave the Doctor a punch on the shoulder. He seemed to appreciate it.

He gave her a smile and a poke to the forehead - she assumed this was some form of a show of endearment - and pulled a single lever, sending them into the TARDIS at the heart of that small moon.

As they cascaded down into the moon, however, Clara saw the Doctor's face. He was uneasy, now. His hands were tense and his brow had a sheen of sweat, glimmering slightly as he waited for the TARDIS to land. He had no idea what was outside of that door. She had an inkling that he didn't want to - not really.

'So,' she said, nudging him. 'You're okay?'

'Really,' he lied. 'I'm fine.'


	16. E2C7: An Unearthly Man

The TARDIS landed sharply, making a hollow _thud_ as it materialised inside another TARDIS. The Doctor, Simuss and Clara all looked at each other, waiting to see if they were all ready. They all moved at once. They were all lying.

Clara wasn't prepared to see what had happened to all those innocent people at the hands of the Doctor's brethren.

Simuss wasn't prepared to step back into the vicinity of the creature that had stolen his humanity, and was taking other people's too.

The Doctor, however, simply wasn't ready to see another Time Lord. Not like this. This wasn't right. He had a million questions and a mission which would most likely make sure none of them were answered.

They pushed through the doors, all three of them, stepping out into a console room that looked almost identical to the white one they had just left, only it was huge. And by huge, it wasn't, like, concert-hall huge. It was hollowed-out-moon big.

'Gug's a TARDIS,' the Doctor said. 'It had the small cave one attached to it, but Gug is just one huge TARDIS. It disguised itself as a moon, and people just forgot about it.'

'The first mention of Gug in recorded history is over a million years ago,' Simuss said. 'Does that mean that the green figure has been in there all this time? A million years, trapped inside a box.'

'Until we came along, yeah,' the Doctor nodded. 'Come on.'

He lead them towards the pillar, the unimaginably tall pillar of white glass and shimmering lights.

Clara found it hard to cope with the scale of it. The room was the size of a small planet - the false gravity resulting in them being at what was the bottom of a huge ball, on the inside. She wondered if the artificial gravity would keep them locked to the side no matter where they went, or if it would soon start to feel like walking up a hill, up the curve.

'So that's two TARDISes,' Clara said, wondering how important that was. From the Doctor's lack of a response, she summised it was probably important. This place had actually rendered him to not wanting to think about it. 'How many more?'

'Don't know,' the Doctor said.

'Where did they come from?' Simuss asked.

'Don't know,' the Doctor said again.

'How have we never seen them? Clara asked.

'Don't know anything, apparently,' the Doctor laughed.

'I do,' said Susan.

The Doctor span. It couldn't be. No.

Her hair was just the same as it had been, all that time ago. Back before the war, when they were just setting off. She was the reason she started, really. Got him off the planet. He took her to learn, to experience new worlds. New schools.

She was wearing the same things. She looked like a picture. A memory. That must be it.

'I am,' she said, her voice sending a painful shudder down his spine. 'Just a memory, I mean. I'm not- well, I'm dead. I'm sorry, Grandfather. For everything you've been through.'

'Susan?' He just looked at her. He couldn't stop.

'Grandfather?' Clara asked, but they both ignored her.

'Hello,' she smiled. They stood, silent for a moment in the hollow moon. 'It's mine,' she said eventually. 'The TARDIS. Took a leaf out of your book when the war started. I tried to run. Get out.'

'There wasn't a way out,' he said, his voice cracking. He coughed. 'Nothing got out.'

'The Daleks did,' she said. Her image flickered and it struck the Doctor like a slap to the face. 'The Emperor got out.'

'The Emperor died. I was there.'

'Not in the war.'

'No, but the Universe caught up with it. What about you?' He looked up to her. 'You're a projection. What happened?'

'I grew old. I didn't look like this when I died, but it's the best way to talk to you. When Rassilon tried to bring Gallifrey to the Earth, I was there. I warned Wilfred Mott, with a few others. We revolted against Rassilon in the final days. His time was passed.'

'How did you do it?'

'The hole Rassilon opened up by throwing through that gem was tiny, but it was a hole. The Master assisted us in creating a machine capable of holding it open long enough to catapult a TARDIS through. This was the first one we sent. Then another, which crashed into this one-'

'That'll be the cave,' the Doctor noted.

'-and then we lost contact with both. We sent through mine, but there was something that went wrong... My TARDIS wasn't protected like the others. It was older... I didn't... I'm sorry Grandfather.'

'You died trying to run away?' he asked.

She looked ashamed, but he was so very proud of her. 'You did what you should have. It was brave of you to leave a fight like that one. And you had a team of how many?'

'Seven. As far as I know, six of us got through.'

'You went last?'

'Of course. I had to make sure everyone else got through.'

'Alone?'

'Yes.'

'And you died because of it.'

'I was wrong, I know-'

'No, Susan. I can't believe I'm saying your name. You stopped Rassilon, took on the Master as a friend, fought to get out and sacrificed your safety to make sure everyone else got out before you did. I'm proud. So very, very proud of you.'

She flickered again.

'I'm just a projection, but you should know, Grandfather. This TARDIS, it's sitting on top of the hole in the Time Lock. You have to protect it. I don't know what happened to the other six, but something is here.'

'It's a Time Lord.'

'One of us?'

'I'm guessing so.'

'Who? What do they want?'

'You don't know?'

'This is just an echo of my last thoughts, Grandfather. I know nothing other than this place needs to be kept safe and that I love you. My Grandfather, the hero of Gallifrey.'

The Doctor started to cry and it broke Susan's heart, even as a projection, to not be able to hold him. Keep him safe.

Clara did it for her, keeping him upright as his body sagged.

Susan watched him, her eyes warm, until they snapped upwards. A green glow filled the room.

'You're here,' she whispered. 'It's you. What did you do?'

'Well, Susan,' the green figure laughed. 'I thought you would know me best. After all, you are my mother.'


	17. E2C8: Carl

'What's in the box?!' Simuss screamed, demanding an answer. His eyes were wide and accusing, searching for some twist, some sign from the shadows.

'Would rather know what that is, or where they went?' the shadows asked, turning the tide. It's ambiguous, androgynous voice had an authority that made it difficult for Simuss to hold his own, but he tried. He held.

'Fine,' he said. 'First, you tell us where they went. What happened to them. What you did-'

'We did nothing!' it roared. 'We did nothing to them. We watched you become more... this place, the Doctor calls it a TARDIS, it is what attacked them. You.'

'Me?' Simuss was quiet now, no longer in a yelling match. He was thinking. He wanted all the answers. For so long, he was in the dark, hopeless. Now the Doctor had shown him light, he was greedy for it and he didn't care. He wanted to know. 'How do you know the Doctor's name?'

'It is one of three things we were born knowing,' it said. 'The first was to find the Doctor. His name rang in our ears before we had opened our eyes. Doctor. We knew you upon sight regardless of your changing face.'

'Yes, well, I have a very definitive persona,' he said with a perfectly straight face.

'What was the second?' Simuss ordered.

'The box. It should not be opened, not until the right time. It is not ready yet. It needs to know what will happen when the TARDIS attacks those who wander into it.'

'What's inside?'

'We don't know,' it said, honestly. 'We only know it is not ready yet.'

'When will it be ready?' the Doctor asked.

'Once it has seen all it need to.'

'Third,' Simuss ordered, wanting to know everything he could about this place. 'What is third?'

'That we are it's eyes,' the shadows said. 'We are, in some way linked to that box. Whatever is inside, it cannot act on it's own. It manipulated this TARDIS to act on it's behalf, taking wanderers and changing them.'

'Any wanderers?' the doctor asked.

'Only humans,' is said, slowly, thinking about it. 'Only ever humans. They seem to be drawn to this place.'

'I was drawn here,' the Doctor said. 'Subtly, but there was always something. Pulling me into the dark. Anyway, if you are it's eyes, what have you seen?'

'What happened?' Simuss asked, softer now. More wary of what the answer could be.

'Humans would wander in, and we would watch them be changed. The TARDIS, it would attack them, and they would emerge. New. A new fear in them, we could feel it, but we never did anything.'

'You're talking as though... oh,' the Doctor nodded, hand closing over his mouth. 'Oh...' he looked at Simuss, a quizzical look. 'Is it possible?'

'Is what possible?' Simuss asked. 'That I'm a Time Lord? Why am I a Time Lord if they were all human. What am I doing here?!'

'You were changed, Simuss,' the shadows said. 'You are human, but you are not.'

'It's called a chameleon arch,' the Doctor said, his voice low. 'I've used one before. Once. To become human. It rewrites your biology, alters every cell, your basic, fundamental physiology changes.'

'Into what?'

'Time Lord.'

Simuss looked at the shadows, which seemed to have shrunken away, ashamed. 'I'm human?' he asked, looking at the Doctor.

'Not right now,' he said. 'For some reason, whatever is in this box was luring in humans and changing them into Time Lords and then... what?'

There was a silence.

'Are you talking to us?' the shadows asked.

'Well, you're the eyes, what happened?' Where did they go, once they had changed in Time Lords what happened?!'

'The lost their memories. They wandered into the dark, after cowering.'

'They went against their fears and walked into the darkness,' the Doctor said, thinking. 'Someone created Time Lords, that's impossible. It is completely not possible. No law of physics would allow it.'

'Why not?' Simuss asked. 'You were human.'

'That's different, going from Time Lord to human is like regression. Humans and Time Lords share lineage, were' like cousin species. We're the older cousin, we came first, so becoming human is like winding forward the clock, pushing evolution in a specific direction within parameters that are set by biology. But going backwards in evolution only ever results in -' He stopped dead. 'Wait... wait, while I was human my consciousness was locked inside a watch. A little fob watch.' The Doctor span to the shadows, accusingly. 'Is there anywhere that their human spirits could have been locked in?'

'The box?' Simuss offered.

'No, the box is the controlling entity. This needs locked up. There would be somewhere else- but no. No there won't.'

'I'm lost,' Simuss said, not following.

'It's clever, annoyingly clever. I could save them, turn them back into humans, turn on the light and fix this door and we'd all be okay. Give them back their memories, their lives. YOur life, Simuss.'

'Why can't you?'

'Because they're in the box. Whatever it is, it locked them in with it. That's why you knew my name, shadows. Whatever is in here, it knows me. It knows I could figure it out. All of this. Figure out that the only way to save them is to let it out. I can't trap it, that would mean trapping the human spirits.'

'What, so whatever did this is in there, with my memories?'

'And countless others, swimming around together.'

'And if you let out my memories, you let out the big bad monster that trapped them in there.'

'Yeah.'

'Why? What's the point in trapping yourself in a box. This is a huge plot, a plan that doesn't make any sense to me.'

'Maybe it didn't choose to be in the box. It found some leakage, a way to control the TARDIS, psychically. It's strong enough mentally to literally create creatures of shadow to do it's bidding. It didn't choose to get in, but it can force me to spring the lock.'

'Will you?' the shadows asked.

'I might have to,' the Doctor said. 'It's the only way to save all those people, somewhere down in the caves. Save their memories.'


	18. E2C9: Sneaky and Mean

'Any of them?' Simuss asked. 'But there's two hundred.'

'I know,' the Doctor nodded, holding his mouth.

'So he did it again,' Simuss said, giving a humourless laugh. 'He bloody well did it again.'

'He did what?' Clara asked. 'We don't even know- oh. He's making you let him go again.'

The Doctor nodded. 'First, we need to get everyone out. There's two hundred and thirty six perfectly human people in there, and one who we still need to take care of even if they are possessed by a Time-Lord with PTSD.'

'PTSD?'

'Post-traumatic stress disorder. The war must have got to him, plus being stuck here for so long. That type of violence, and then all of that time to dwell in it. Alone, in a destroyed TARDIS, your body broken like that.'

'I was going to ask, how does a Time-Lord turn into a glowing green mass in a box?'

'Well, it was regeneration energy, but it had festered. Rotted a little inside that box. It's an echo of what a Time-Lord was. You hear that, Carl? Nothing more than an echo. Susan, I'm gonna go ahead and assume that you're like some kind of psycho-link with me, picking out a person from my past I like to talk to me and retailing details as though you were her?'

'I think I might be,' she said. 'Mixed with the real Susan's last thoughts and the TARDIS database... I can't...'

'Susan I need you to go back, into the record. What happened. Who put him in that box after he started to regenerate?'

'I'll try,' she said, and promptly flickered out of existence.

'Now then,' the Doctor said, whipping out his sonic screwdriver and lighting it up. He smiled and pushed a button. 'There's one thing Time-Lords aren't very good at doing, in my experience.'

'What that?' Simuss asked.

The Doctor slid the sonic further and the TARDIS, his own TARDIS, began to materialise around him. 'Act human.' The blue box encase him, and he quickly stepped back out the front door, smiling to them. 'First thing we need to do is get all of those people unplugged, the we'll take them up to the surface.'

'Oh that's brilliant!' Clara grinned. 'The people up there, they'll be able to tell which one's faking, right?'

'I should hope so. Now, get to it, we need to pull those beams out slowly,' he moved towards the closest person, the same woman as last time. Tenderly poking the snake, he tugged at a small bump maybe an inch down from where it connected to her head.

Pop.

It was off.

Clara and Simuss began working immediately, getting every person out as slowly and cautiously as possible, but a slick as they could.

While they were working, Susan reappeared next to the Doctor, her head low.

'I can show you,' she said. the Doctor nodded and felt her hands, much more real than a projection on his head, as she swept him away into the past.

The hovered, watching down upon the crystalline TARDIS console room that had now redesigned itself, and there stood a man who the Doctor assumed to be Carltesque. He was a tall man, with thin legs but strong arms. Slender but tough.

He hobbled, his leg hurt - possibly even broken. Leaning against the console, head resting against the huge central crystal, he let out a breath. 'I think this is it,' he said, breathing more heavily now. 'I'm regenerating.'

His eyes began to glow a deep emerald green, a green that quickly enveloped his body.

A man walked in, the box under his arm. 'Carlteqsue, you have to stop.'

'Stop?' Carl yelled, astonished. 'But this is it, brother! We can roam the Universe as it is, without destroying anything!'

'Carlteqsue, doing what you want to do would blow a hole in the side of the Universe. Here, that would unlock the Time War.'

'Everything would go back to normal. Do you know why it was hell, Master?'

'Why's that?'

'Because everything that happened was condensed. Trapped in a bubble. Break the bubble, I reckon the War stops. We can go about our business as usual.'

The green energy began to swarm now, getting more impressive, more heated. The Master took a deep breath and lifted the box, opening it wide and sucking in Carl's green regeneration energy, swirling and screaming until it was snapped shut, cutting the scene short.

All of a sudden, the Doctor was back in the room, like a bad hypnosis trick.

Susan moved her hands away and the Doctor nodded. 'Okay. The Master saved the day. Carl was planning on opening up the hole in the Time War that would, for whatever reason, save the Universe.'

'I'm not sure he was 'all there'.'

'Nor me. But this gives us a clue - if the Master was here all that time ago, then he must still be somewhere. He can give us a hand seeing as he seems to be all do-gooding now. However, before that, back to all of this. We can do this!'

It seemed that barely a minute had passed, as Simuss and Clara had managed to unhook barely fifty of the two hundred, so the Doctor joined in.

Eventually they had everyone unhooked, and it took the a minute to recover and to come back into clear thinking. One-by-one, the Doctor, Clara, Simuss and Susan's projected ghost ushered the two-hundred people into the Doctor's TARDIS.

Two hundred people hidden under the skin of a false moon, one of them possessed by a Time Lord intent on releasing the Time War, and a TARDIS disguised as said moon that also happens to be sitting on top of the very hole in reality Carltesque wanted to rip open.

This was an interesting one.

Once the Doctor had reunited the two hundred missing people with their bewildered kin back on Gug's surface, he waited to see if any of them would falter. He told them all about what had happened, that they would have to stay for a little while so he could scan them. Look for traces.

Nothing.

Carl was gone in amidst a sea of the innocent.

_Again._

He had a style, that was something to know. Take people hostage, use the Doctor's compassion against him, all of that. It worked. It was sneaky and mean, but it worked.

He had to let them go, of course. He had to let him go.

So he had a back-up.

'Susan,' he smiled as he stepped out of his own TARDIS and into the centre of the moon. 'You waited up.'

'Doctor,' she said, her head low. 'Grandfather. I know what I am. I know you have to-'

'Give you a job? Excellent. Then you know what you're doing and I don't have to brief you.'

'...What?'

'Well, you didn't think I was going to turn you off, did you?'

'I...'

'Well, in that case, you silly thing, you should know that I want you to take care of this place. Don't let him back in. Set up the security. Keep the Time War locked away, where it belongs.'

'I... okay.'

'Okay?'

'Okay. I can do that. I know I'm not-'

'You're not her, but you still have sentience.' He swiped his screwdriver across her and smiled. 'There we go.'

'What did you do?' his Granddaughter asked.

'I soniced you.'

'For what?'

'For you. Try this,' he said, stepping forward and stroking her arm. He could touch her. She grinned and wrapped her arms around him, squeezing tight. He'd missed that from her.

He'd missed her.

'You were showing signs of physicality earlier. I just pushed it. Made it so.'

'I've missed you, Granddad.'

He smiled that heart-wrenching smile he did, where it pulled at his lips but sagged in his eyes. 'I've missed you too.'


	19. E3C1: Lussi

'There's no way this is going to work,' Lussi said, her hands shaking over a button. She held a small circular device with a single red button on which was linked to her chestplate, an armoured, scaled piece of clothing with wiring casing the seams and technology sewn into the metallic fabric.

'Of course it will. You've done it a thousand times. Just don't die like last time, and you'll be fine.'

'Oh yeah, 'just don't die', nice little tidbit there Jaymse. Real nice.'

'Just don't die. I hate having to reload you. Why did you have to use all of your lives again?'

'Well, this took a few tries to get right. I think I've got it. I really do.'

She gave Jaymse a hopeful smile before pressing the button and holding it down. A blue line sprouted from the red base, blinking at her. 'Sycorax,' she said as clearly as she could. A figure of a Sycorax female shot up from the blue line and she pressed the button.

A quick, blinding blue light shrouded her body and she smiled. She couldn't feel it at all. Brilliant!

Jaymse sat and watched, almost unimpressed, but his gaze gave him away. He was curious.

The person that emerged from the fading blue light no longer looked like Lussi. It was a Sycorax, bone-face and all. She smiled.

'It worked!' she squealed. 'No more memory loss! No pain! I got it working!'

'You always had it working,' Jaymse said. 'You built the damn thing to begin with.'

'I know, but now it _actually_ works!'

Jaymse sighed. 'Lussi, you wanna go hunting?'

'I hate it when you call it that.'

'You know what I mean. You want any species in particular? I know we lost out TARDIS, but we can still get around. I've managed to salvage a few things from our hunts in the past. We have a ship.'

'Umm, I'm not sure there's any that I'm in desperate need of... unless-'

'Nope.'

'You didn't even listen to me!'

'We're not going Dalek-hunting.'

'But I want to know! Especially now! Look at me, all Sycorax-y, no sides effects. It works!'

'I'm not letting you turn into a Dalek. It's not like you'd just have to brush past one. You'd need to get up-close and personal with the squidgy stuff inside.'

'You're not my dad.'

'No, I'm not. But I'm still in charge.'

She huffed. 'What happened to all of our team missions? We had a good thing going. Apart from all the dying and stuff.'

'Yeah, well, that's why we got out. We left it behind, Lussi. We left it.'

She smiled. 'We got away!'

She was only young, Lussi. Jaymse thought that maybe something had happened to her, something that made her the way she was. It wasn't that she was stupid or anything, he just felt that, more often than not, she would... switch off. Stop listening. Stop caring. Stop understanding. She'd go into her own world that had it's own rules and laws and she lived by those ones.

That's what made it so easy.

Lussi pressed the button and held it. 'Revert.'

The blue light engulfed her and, when it revealed her, she was back in her original form. She smiled.

'Yeah, we got away,' Jaymse said. 'Now, where's your list?'

'My list?'

'You have a list of all of your favourite species. Where is it?'

'Oh!' She darted off, her small frame disappearing behind a curtain. Jaymse sat down into a soft chair that moulded to his shape perfectly. Looking up, he saw the curtain between this central room and his bedroom, perfectly still, on the right. In the centre was the one to Lussi's room, moving slightly after her quick passage through. On the left was the curtain that lead outside, into the market.

Jaymse had a fleeting thought about whether they were going to have enough to sell come the Purchase Week. They had plenty, but it wasn't how much you had - it was the quality of your stock.

He and Lussi had a slightly... morally questionable way of getting their stock once a month - stealing. Kind of.

Lussi was brilliant, that's the core of it. She was a genius, even before everything that happened. And Jaymse had always been able to get what he wanted. He had a special skill of his own that he wasn't sure Lussi was even aware of. If she was, she never mentioned it. He never brought it up.

This brilliance, along with Lussi's impressive technology, made it very easy for her to get into places they wouldn't usually be able to get within a thousand miles of. And if she could get into places, she could take things from them. Expensive things.

In return, these 'hunts' would most likely end with her coming into contact with a new species, and that was what she loved more than anything. That was her world.

Jaymse sometimes thought that it might just be a form of escape for her, but then again, she used to do it back when the Universe was awful and bloody. Perhaps she misses it. In any case, she likes to find new species, take a sample of DNA, and build her collection of possible creatures to become.

Lussi came back through, now with a small piece of paper in her hands.

'What's next on the list?' Jaymse asked her.

'There's the Daleks-'

'No! Lussi, you're not doing that!'

'Well, then there's nothing! I've finished my list.' She took a breath, 'Can we go find a new one?'

'A new one?'

'Discover a species. Explore a world! Like the Doctor!'

'The Doctor? That man is no role model, I'll tell you that.'

'But he was so... hopeful.'

'The man was Death.'

'He was life, too. Don't you remember? He saved us, and he helped us and we helped him. It was good, for a while.'

'Then everything got bad again.'

'We're okay now,' Lussi said with a small grin. 'Could we?'

'I'll think about it,' Jaymse relented.

Lussi squeaked, bounced with happiness, and bolted back into her room.


	20. E3C2: What does the Fox Hunt say?

'So,' Jaymse said as they made their way to the front curtain. They'd taken some of their TARDIS technology while they could, so they had a doorway that seemed to turn black, and then they were opening a door. It never registered with them where the change was, from pushing the curtain aside to turning a doorknob, but it just happened.

The thick, steel door opened out onto the market, but it's usually-busy, bustling feel was dead. Rain pelted the stalls. Creatures of all shapes and sized rushed past without giving a single item a second thought. It was still a few weeks until Market week. No one cared yet.

'Where d'ya want to go?' he asked her.

'Roxmanop!' she chimed, happily holding her face up to the hard rain. 'I love it on Roxmanop, plus there's always something new there. Someone new!'

'Roxmanop, that's a good hour-long journey. You bring a book?'

'Nope. I'm going to play with being a Judoon.'

'Judoon? Isn't it illegal to impersonate a member of the Shadow Proclamation, Lu?'

'Maybe, but they won't find me. I'm everywhere, anyone. Remember? That was my whole point.'

'Old times, Lu. What's your job now?'

'Cataloging as many species as possible. When we had the TARDIS, it was ever, but now, it's just whatever we can find.'

'And what's mine?'

'To take what you can. What you have to.'

'Excellent. Now,' he said as they moved out of the large Market and into the smaller streets of this large planet. They were in a particularly thick segment of city, where the brown buildings stretched up to the sky, but there was always a place for the market. Always. 'Roxmanop. What do you want to do there? It's a big place.'

'Yeah, but I want to go to the beaches there.'

'Ahh, the scarlet beaches. I hear they're quite spectacular. Bring lots of life into people.'

'And they bring lots of people, too,' Lussie chimed, happy. 'I hope we see a creature we've never met before.'

'Are you going in disguise?'

'Nahh, I'll just try a few on the trip over.'

They took a left down a wider stretch that lead to a huge port, to which thousands of ships were tethered, hovering over ground and water alike.

They followed a familiar route to their ship, which Lussi had named 'The Horseman'. Jaymse didn't like the name, but it was memorable, if nothing else.

He clicked in a code and scanned in his eye and the side door popped open, allowing the two to step inside and close the door behind them. He thought about the beaches of Roxmanop - he'd been there once before, a while ago. With Lussi. She'd loved it, but it was during the phase of her life when her psychological fallout was starting to show. He wasn't sure how much she'd remember of it.

It was a good place to hunt. The creatures there were often too relaxed to be fast-acting, and too happy to be suspicious. Perfect pickings.

The issue was finding anything to pick. People didn't tend to take their closest and most prized possessions to the beach but, hey, it was Lussi's turn to choose, after all. It was almost always her turn.

Jaymse settled into the single seat at the front while Lussi stood behind him, hands latched onto the sides of his huge leather chair.

He pressed a few buttons and hit a few levers and they were soon off, powering upwards into the smog, then out of the clouds and into endless black, sprinkled with Starlight. Beautiful.

On the way, Lussi tried a few forms that she'd done before, warming up to the newer ones. She started with her current favourite, the Sycorax, then a Judoon, then a Vespiform and a few other less-distinguishable insectoid species. Eventually she found herself facing her newest addition to the collection - a Zygon. Dangerous things, Zygons. Hard to get near and to touch, never mind get a sample - mind you, that was most of the fun of it.

She knew, however, that there was a certain drawback to this kind of technology that she'd never want to edit out. In fact, it was the part that made her want to keep on going. The psychology of each species.

As her body re-wrote itself, she found that the different surges of chemicals, brain size and capacity, body type and physiology all played a part in how she behaved as a person. Not only would it affect her whilst in that form, but it quite often had a over-lap effect afterwards, too. And, on top of that, the experience of what might happen to her whilst in these mindsets could easily shift how she saw the world in her original form. It was all very philosophical.

'We're about to land,' Jaymse announced just as Lussi reverted back into her usual humanoid shape, and she joined him in the front of house, looking down onto the beautiful green and red planet below.

'Roxmanop!' Lussi beamed as they descended down into a sea-side port that was only just able to keep The Horseman from dipping into the scarlet water.

As they departed and locked the ship, Jaymse made a quick sweep of the area. All around was the burnt brown sand being dragged by the red seas and creatures of all sizes and complexions bathing in the sunlight. Good turn-out.

The made their way to the beach on their right, where Lussi could already see at least two species of alien she'd never met before, and was tugging at Jaymse to let her grab a sample of sweat or something, just to let her try it out.

Jaymse, however, had noticed an aim of his own.

A young, fox-like alien sat on his crossed legs, meditating in the sun atop a solid-crystal plinth. His ears twitched, as though noticing that they were staring at him and his stool, and Jaymse quickly turned to ask Lussi, 'Have you got that species?'

'I think so...' she clicked the button on her pad, though for a second before saying tentatively 'Plothrite!'

She changed in a matter of seconds into a perfectly identical version of the male Fox-like Plothrite, only female and wearing clothes that made her out to be completely out of place.

Not giving half a damn, Lussi strolled over and started talking to the Plothrite, possibly flirting a little to keep his attention, and then strolled back over to Jaymse.

'He knows you're a thief who wants his chair,' she said.

'What about you?'

'He thinks I'm a Plothrite thief who wants his chair. Which, right now, I suppose I am.'

'Can you get it?'

'Possibly,' she thought, knowing she could. 'But I need something from you, Jaymse.'

'What is it?'

'A sweat sample from that Ylgrit'pl. I want it, and you need to get it.'

'What?!' he looked to where she was pointing, and saw what appeared to be a sentient lump of greasy slowly seeping into the sand. 'You have to kidding me.'

'Nope.'

'Balls.'


	21. E3C3: He

Jaymse swallowed a lump in his throat. His shoes dipped into the sand as he took slow step towards the Ylgrit'pl.

It stank.

Like really.

It smelt like wet socks feel.

Jaymse realised he was getting closer, and put on a smile, trying to remember what the traditional way to approach someone was on a tourist planet like this. They had conventions in place, he believed. It had, however, been a while since the two of them had taken a holiday, never mind to somewhere like Roxmanop.

'Greetings!' Jaymse grimaced as he approached the Ylgrit'pl. It turned to him and, he assumed, smiled. 'Jaymse, Human, Male.'

'Hullo!' the thing rang. It's voice was odd, even through the translator Jaymse had installed into his ear. 'Hawll, Ylgrit'pl. Male.'

'May I shake your hand?' Jaymse asked, hoping it would be that easy. He was having trouble keeping his breakfast in his stomach, he didn't want to be here long. One handshake and a sample would be acquired. Easy.

'Don't have hands,' Hawll laughed. Hi's mouth seemed to bubble from underneath the mess.

'Err, I must insist.'

'Must you?' If he had eyebrows, Jaymse imagined they would be raised.

'I must. It's customary, back on Earth.'

'Earth?' Hawll asked, looking Jaymse up and down. He sniffed. 'You don't smell like Earth.'

'Haven't been home in a while. I've actually got a stall on the Market, over on Lihoh.'

'You run a stall?'

'I do, friend.'

'Well, in that case you can get away, not-such-an-Earthling. Thieves, the lot of you.'

Jaymse nodded, and walked behind Hawll before slowing. He took a flask from the inside pocket of his waistcoat and scraped it against Hawll's back.

Jaymse gagged.

'What was that?!' Hawll cried out, trying to shuffle round to see him, but Jaymse took off running, slowly feeling the seaside air push back into his nostrils, replacing the thick stench of Ylgrit'pl sweat.

He handed Lussi the flask. 'There you go. Now go get me my stool.'

'Already got it,' she smiled, still in her Plothrite form. He only now noticed that she was, indeed, sat on the gem-like pedestal. He glanced over to where the male Plothrite had been, but he was gone.

'Where'd he go?' Jaymse asked.

'He's waiting somewhere. He gave me an address, said to bring the chair. It was a 'goodwill gesture' or something. I don't care.'

'What did you say you would do?'

'Anything. I made it quite clear.'

Jaymse smiled. 'We might make a little thief of you yet.'

'What do you mean?'

'Never mind. Let's just go before that lump of... ugh... gets up and follows. Or your new friend.'

'I think he might be a little deluded.'

'You think?'

'I think he thought I was going to follow him.'

'Why would he think that?'

'Because I told him I would.' They started walking back towards The Horseman, and Lussi started laughing. 'I got a chair from a Plothrite.' She laughed again. 'Ha!'

Jaymse smiled, holding the stool under his leg when he heard Hawll over his shoulder, yelling something in a language he didn't know.

Lussi and Jaymse giggled like idiots as they climbed onto The Horseman, and set off without a second thought to the poor Fox. The Horseman climbed into the air, forcing Hawll to stay far enough away for them to laugh at him out of the window.

Jaymse was the first to stop laughing as he saw a figure through the fog and smoke from their ship; a face he really didn't want to see.

He said nothing.

They set off home.

Lussi, happy from the day's success, was playing with becoming a Ylgrit'pl, much to Jaymse's annoyance. He attempted to ignore the sudden, piercing stench of Lussi's new option, but it was all too much. Gagging was a reflex that wouldn't stay restricted.

Even so, he was distracted. That face. It was haunting.

Hours later, they touched down. Lussi, naive as ever, bounced out and into her room to tinker and edit. Jaymse, feeling altogether less bouncy, sat and looked over some numbers for the stall. They had plenty of income, but he was bothered. He should have used his gift, but it's not usually so public as it was. He doesn't often spend money on food, not for him anyway. He didn't need it - or at least, he wouldn't, if he'd used his 'gift'.

Anyway, he'd just sneak off in the night, Lussi's a heavy sleeper, so it shouldn't be too hard, or at least it wouldn't. Not now he'd seen _him_.

If _he_ was following them, or even looking for them, it'd be a hard job staying hidden. It wasn't the kind of situation you get out of. They'd been silent for so long, keeping their head's down, staying to themselves. They'd even managed to stop anyone from finding out about their technology - well, there was a slip-up, but it was kept quiet. Jaymse had taken care of it, and he'd felt great for a week afterwards.

Maybe that was enough. Maybe he'd find out about it.

Jaymse wasn't even sure it was who he thought it was.

It probably wasn't.

Maybe it was just someone who'd heard Hawll yelling and wanted to know what was going on. Or he'd seen Lussi steal the stool, and was trying to chase her down.

It could be anyone.

But was it_ him_?

Jaymse lay back in his comfy chair, the one he didn't let Lussi anywhere near. He lazed with his feet up on his new jewel stool, ready to be sold, and read through the numbers. They had enough money now, he thought. They could move on to the next planet with a market, or a city planet. Lussi would like the people, he guessed. Or maybe she'd enjoy a bit of peace, a little countryside. Some trees and fields. He knew he would.

He set an alarm to get him up in the depth of night so he could go and recuperate, away from Lussi. Away from preying eyes.

Hopefully, he wouldn't be hearing a knock at the curtain. He couldn't deal with him. Not with that part of his past. They'd gotten away, they didn't need it coming back. They got out.

They got out.


	22. E3C4: The Man He Couldn't Remember

Jaymse was up.

It was the middle the night. He could smell it. You know, the way night smells. Cold, sharp, but homely. His alarm pulsed in his ear, only audible to him. Lussi didn't need to know anything. She'd hate him if she did.

He stood, shaking off his short-lived sleep. He doesn't sleep often anymore - most nights start like this, and end with too much of a buzz for him to get any real slumber. He just makes his way with strength of will and adrenaline, plus the reapings of his nightly wanders.

Jaymse headed out into the empty skeleton of the Market. Stalls were bare, tents like his set up behind them, full of future sales and stock.

Making his way towards the docks, Jaymse noticed a tent with a light slipping out from between slightly ajar curtains to his left. He couldn't miss an opurtunity like that. It was so easy, and fast. It'd be nice to get his energy back quickly after a day like today.

Moving quietly towards the tent, he stuck to the shadows, letting the darkness enthral him. He took light steps and lighter breaths, pausing to listen for any commotion within.

Silence.

He brought up courage to look inside, into the light.

Jaymse flattened himself against the floor, peaking under the curtain to se inside - it was modern. Modern enough. The lights were white, the floor black, silver sweeping structures enveloping the walls into a fireplace, a chair, a sofa. A sofa upon which there was a snoring lump of a man, whose night was about to be ruined.

Jaymse knew him, he realised. He sold electronics. Very prestigous stuff, too. Made him a lot of money. A lot more than gemmed trinkets like him and Lussi. He was called something stupid. Something with too many vowels.

He stayed to the floor, knowing that the light being on gave him a masive disadvantage, but it also gave him the easy knowledge of knowing there was someone inside. It was easy pickings, if he could bring himself to take them.

Although, the light being on also could mean there was someone else about. It made sense. Maybe this was a really bad idea. It was. It was a really bad idea.

Jaymse knew that the instand the second person walked through. The man's daughter. She looked six, maybe seven. Both of them human. Both helpless.

Now, Jaymse had often done this with people with families. It wasn't hard if they were bad people, or even good people with good families. But with a daughter like that... It reminded him of Lussi. Bless her, she wasn't the kind of person who could take care of herself. She was brilliant ad fiesty when she wanted to be, but she'd forget to eat if he didn't remind her to.

He saw Lussi in her.

Damn.

This wasn't the right place.

He moved back and, with a spinning head, stood up. Although he was completely upright, outside and in the dark, he could feel eyes on him. the cold didn't feel welcoming anymore. It felt like it was hiding something from him.

He tried to walk, but his strength was plummetting and his leg gave out under him.

'I need...' he whispered. 'I need to...' He couldn't get it out. He didn't even know why he was trying to, it was massively incriminating.

On his knees, he looked back into the tent with the man and his daughter. She was gone. The light was off. He was snoring.

'I need to,' Jaymse told himself. 'I need to.'

Crawling in, he cursed himself. He screamed at himself for getting into this position, where it was one person a night. A place like this, people go missing all the time, but it would always get out. They'd always push it, and have to move. It was always his fault, and Lussi didn't know a thing.

The black stone floor was unnaturally warm against his shins as he dragged himself up to the man's side.

He couldn't even remember his name.

It was heartless. It was cold. So cold, Jaymse hesitated for a second, considering allowing himself to die. What if it all just ended. After everything, the wars and the fighting and the escape plans and the pain, it could end here. On the floor of some stranger's tent.

Or he could be a killer. It wasn't killing persay, but it was enough to get him and Lussi removed if he was caught. If he was found here, they'd put the peices together. all the mysterious deaths in the area, they'd know it was him. They'd assume Lussi had something to do with it, too.

He couldn't allow that.

He had to live.

He had to protect her.

He had to fight for her. Fight the addiction, or give in to it. Give in to the power. He could never tell her. She would hate him so much. She would hate everything about him. She was so innocent, so full of life - her only wish being to experience life from all perspectives, as all life forms. She wants to live so so much, and he was stealing that.

Jaymse took the man he couldn't remember's hand and squeezed. 'I'm sorry, my friend,' he said before allowing the energy to flow.

Suddenly his heart was pounding. He'd blacked out. It was day time. The Sun. Light. The Daughter. Lussi.

All of these thing impacted his eyes so fast he didn't have time to think. Explain. He panicked.

Lussi asked something.

The Daughters screamed something.

The Sun burned.

A man was there. He watched, silent. Lussi held his hand.

Her lips were next to his as she whispered 'I know what you've done Jaymse, and I will never forgive you.'

And with the sound of a flapping curtain, he was alone.

Even the daughter was gone.

Eventually Jaymse gathered the ability to sit up and think. Why was he uncoscious like that? Where did the daughter go?

He looked to where the man had been, but now it was simply his shell. The husk of his skin, holding no life.

Next to him was a glass Jaymse would find to have held poison - the same poison Jaymse then absorbed, leading to Lussi discovering him.

He'd been greedy.

He killed a father.

Lussi had left.

She was gone.

She got out.


	23. E3C5: A Bubble

Jaymse woke up again.

He shot up, buzzing. Moving was so easy, he was made to move, he had to run, had to think - what had happened? Had Lussi really left?

He darted to the curtain and threw it back, looking up to the moon. It was the same night. He'd dreamt it. He'd dreamt her leaving.

Often the nightmares happen when he took a little too much. He knew he'd killed the man, but he didn't want to drain him dry. Now he might get noticed.

He looked to the vial on the side, filled with the poison he'd dreamt of. The man had tried to kill himself, and then he'd taken that in. Would it affect him?

Of course it wouldn't, he was full of life. Full of it.

Lussi.

If she wasn't back in the tent, then he hadn't dreamt it, it was real and he'd just missed another day.

Thoughts bounced around Jaymse's head, confusing him, spurring him and spinning him. He needed her to be there. She had to be there. If she wasn't, he had no idea what he'd do - he'd disappointed her. She was the last thing he had going for him. He had to take care of her, keep her safe and secure and playing with her technology.

He darted back to the tent he had left Lussi in, their tent, throwing aside her curtain and bursting in, calling her name.

'Lussi?!'

Her bed seemed flat, but as he threw back the covers he saw her, curled up, with light blurring against her face.

'I'm sorry!' she cried out, throwing the device aside. 'I'm sorry Jaymse!'

'I... what?'

'I'm sorry! Don't take it away, please!'

'You were on your phone?'

'I'm so sorry...'

'But you're still here? You're okay?'

'I... what?'

'Lussi,' Jaymse sat at the end of her bed and patted her foot. 'You know I love you, like you were my little sister.'

'Yeah?'

'Well, I need you to trust me. I think we're going to have to leave again.'

'What?! No!'

'Lussi listen to me-'

'But you promised! You said at least one more market day!'

'And we'll stay for the market day, but after that we need to go, okay?'

'I like it here. I have friends.'

'Do you?'

'...No. I_ could_ have friends.'

'Do you remember home, Lussi?'

Lussi stared at him blankly for a moment. 'I don't think I do...'

'What do you remember? What's your earliest memory?'

'You and the others... we were hot, hurt. I wasn't. You were. Your face was different, but then you exploded and turned into you!'

'I did. Do you remember the Doctor?'

'Yeah, the Doctor. He was helping us but... he left.'

'Left?'

'Left.'

'Do you remember why he 'left'?'

'No, I don't. I'm confused, why are you asking me all of this?' Her eyes widened. 'I feel something. In my head... what is that?'

'Do you remember that feeling, Lussi?'

Lussi looked like she was going to panic. Her eyes were fixed on him, her hands shaking as she sat, shrouded in darkness, her silhouette trembling.

'Do you remember?'

'I...' Lussi looked at him, her eyes shining in the light from the main section of the tent - she was lost, it seemed. Lost inside some memory she wasn't sure she even had. 'I do...'

'Where is it from?'

'There's a place...'

'Yes?'

'It looks... it's in a bubble.'

'A bubble?'

'A huge bubble. And there's a temple inside...'

'That's home, Lussi. You remember!'

'What's it called?'

'Gallifrey. Home. That's where we come from, the Doctor, me, you, all of us. The Horsemen.'

'I take offence to that,' she said. 'Horse-people it should be. But that sounds like we look like Horses. What are we talking about?'

'Home, Lussi.'

'Oh. Yeah.'

'It's gone, though. We Time Lords, Lussi, we have a Hive mind. Had. It died, along with our world. We were supposed to die too, but we got out, remember? We cut ourselves off. The Doctor went off to fight his fights, and we never saw him again. Do you remember, Lussi?'

'Yeah... no.'

'The Doctor. I think he's coming back.'

'Isn't that good?'

'Maybe. Maybe not. Do you remember what they called us, Lussi?'

'The Horsemen. Slightly misogynistic, but whatever.'

'The Horsemen, that's right. Based on some old legend, all across the Universe. There are always four, always representing four different aspects of the end of times. Do you know what they were?'

'I remember Famine.'

'That's me, good.'

'You were Famine?'

'I was. And you were?'

She paused for a minute, eyes closed, going through these new memories that were cracked and over-exposed. 'Pestilence.'

'That's right.'

'And the Master... he was War.'

'And the Doctor, do you remember who he was? Why I want us to leave in his wake?'

'Death,' she said. 'The Doctor is Death.'


End file.
